Well, that sure is the most "first world problem," tone deaf thing I've heard all day.

"third world" countries don't have forums on the internet?

We do, we just dont lose any sleep about them, you americans take social media way too seriously

I agree with his ultimate conclusion -- don't start a forum.

It is no fun being an internet referee.

It is fun if you are seeking status or power, and thus it ends up attracting similarly inclined people.

It was amusing to me watching this comment turn grey when first stumbling upon it, I wonder if some apparently think entithas is just lying about it or if they’ve truly never come across a moderator or group of moderators who were just a power-tripping JERKS in their internet lives, and so thoroughly disbelieve there are people out there who just want power over a measly phpbb message board or subreddit that they just downvoted this and ran away.

I envy everyone who has yet to come across it, yours is truly a blessed internet experience. Those kinds of rulers just sap the joy out of communities and lead to splinter after splinter.

I imagine it was downvoted because it came across as a jab at the HN moderators.

Looking at the bigger picture, yeah, I have to agree. I have seen a virtual coup d'etat on a subreddit dedicated to fast food. (One moderator got kicked out. He responded by creating his own subreddit. He actually got 90% of the posters to come with him, leaving behind an empty husk of a subreddit.)

Does PG actually modertate HN?

I thought he had mods like dang to take care of it for him.

I'd be more interested to hear what dang thinks of HN than what PG thinks.

You could read "The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News". It is a great article.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

Discussion at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052

It's rather silly, but until I read this article, I'd always assumed dang was Asian.

The Chinese Da Ng?

Isn't Ng a Vietnamese name?

Even after all these years I have no idea what Y combinator is or does, nor do I care to learn. I just come here for news stories.

Not that there's anything wrong with just reading the stories, but I'm a bit incredulous that you haven't passively picked up the thesis, from the stories about the investment changes, demo days, and all the uh... YC startups that get discussed and front-paged.

There were some years when there were a slew of "Here's what I learned from applying to YC" stories, but those have mostly faded, and so have most startup-focused stories.

Now HN is a mix of tech news and politics, and I'm not surprised that some HN readers who are not interested in startups have no clue what YC is about.

This has been a big concern of mine lately. I spend more time here than I used to, but I increasingly get less and less value out of the time I spend here. I used to come here to learn about bleeding-edge technology and startups and cool ideas and things that geniuses were working on. Now when I come here I almost always end up arguing politics, not because I want to but because those are the stories that people actively comment on and I have poor self control.

The few tech stories that do make it through are far more pop-tech article (right now NPR, BBC, New York Times, MSN, and Haaretz are all on the front page... absolutely nothing to do with hackers or gratifying intellectual curiosity) or talking about startups that are shutting down.

I'm tired of collapsing the inevitable "Macbooks are bad" thread and finding out that was literally the only conversation under the article. I think the mods do a great job of keeping the conversation civil, but a poor job of enforcing "intellectual curiosity" like the guidelines call for.

If I can offer advice, give your piece if you feel it matters and then move on. One of the nice bits of HN is you can say your opinion and move on. There are no reply notifications. I definitely ended up engaging on forums way more than I should have. I quit one and used that to push myself out of commenting. Now I spend some time commenting here but don’t let myself get pulled back in to needless arguments. There’s a bunch of topics you can skip here and I generally guess at the sentiment of the comment before jumping in. There’s a few things that just end up rehashing the same arguments. Skip them and move on.

I think there's a larger point in what he said. Basically all current social media ends up optimizing for creating outrage, spawning mobs, less thoughtful discussion and more vitriolic arguments, etc. It's becoming a real concern to me that this is going to drive us into some kind of civil war or something if we don't find some way to check it.

The outrage seems to be like a drug. Nothing generates engagement quite like it, even if it's toxic in the long-term. So all social media platforms that embrace it grow bigger until they become near-monopolies, and all that don't so far have had a hard time growing userbases, making money, and generally fade into irrelevance.

It would be a real service to society IMO if we could find a way to somehow generate enough engagement and energy to challenge the big players without the outrage culture.

This outrage is neither happening in a vacuum, nor is it simply a reflexive reaction to outrage on the opposite side.

Real actions in the physical world are at the root of this outrage.

The internet, in all of its forms, simply increases awareness of what's going on around the world.

In the past, there was a relatively miniscule amount of information you could get about what was happening, and you could only get it through some gatekeepers. Now you can see what's happening, often as it happens, in cell phone camera footage and in direct reporting from people who are there, and the opinions of your fellow men are not filtered and reduced to a trickle by gatekeepers.

A pessimistic view is that, like the babel fish, such increased communication will only lead to increased conflict, yet there is evidence that increased understanding and compassion can come from it too.

So thinking about that... One the one hand, suppose I log into reddit and see police officers clubbing some people drinking beers (this specific instance was in a foreign country).

Yes, on the one hand, I'm just more aware of a bad thing in the world. But on the other, if a million people get outraged watching a clip like that, it seems it does create a "magnification" effect where potentially the outrage is entirely disproportionate compared to crime that isn't brutal and on video (e.g. rich avoiding taxes) but may actually be much more important.

True, but kind of misleading, at least in my opinion.

One of the issues with social media is that it's too easy to promote and share information about real-world events that provoke outrage, while paying no attention to broad-level statistics that give a better representation of what's really happening overall.

The greater truth IMO is that, in a large society, a massive number of essentially random things happen every single day. Plenty to construct any type of narrative that you want. If we want to have unity, there is no way around having to sweep some individual events that are outrageous under the rug to some extent.

It's not just that by any means.

I think it's largely a communication problem. People are reacting to what they perceive the other side is saying, without actually taking the time to hear what the other side is saying. They're encouraged both by their side and by the inevitable outrage from the other side. There is also an incredible amount of intentional misrepresentation of the other side (for and from both sides).

If someone posts "B" in response to "A" they're usually doing so because they don't really understand what someone means by "A". They're looking at things at face value while adding in their own filters and biases and respond to that mess, instead of asking questions or seeking out information elsewhere.

On the other hand, the counterresponse to someone posting "B" is often also tone-deaf. It is either assumed the person ought to know what "A" means (even if the people run in different social circles, have access to different news sources, or don't have as much free time to educate themselves); or it is assumed they person does know what "A" means and is being intentionally (as opposed to ignorantly) inflammatory.

Seldom does someone on either side ask for clarification from or help to elucidate the other side.

All of this seems to happen much more on the internet than in "real life."

I had to stop frequenting the r/amitheasshole sub for this very reason. Getting outraged at the assholes, and then having my comments about the assholes get hundreds of upvotes, was too rewarding. It was certainly drug-like.

It is strange, too, because I am normally an extremely forgiving person, and am often criticized for giving too much of the benefit of the doubt to people. Even if I am like that in real life, I was still able to be sucked into the outrage cycle.

That is a truly bizarre subreddit. It’s exactly what you say, people love to go there and get on their high horse.

I also suspect there are a ton of troll posts there. Too many “I am the asshole” questions that seem perfectly aligned to the politics of the day. And the stories seem perfectly written to create conflict.

This is almost any Reddit "advice" sub, like /r/relationships. People write stories for fun and to create conflict.

It's becoming a real concern to me that this is going to drive us into some kind of civil war

I'm more inclined to think that social media is where people go to let off steam. Most people I know have full lives outside of social media, and just get online to relax a bit, if at all. Many people I know have stopped using it at all. The ones who do vent and rant online are the minority, and they are more likely to be doing it online than in person. Of course, there are plenty of trolls and shills who join them, and together they make our society look more ready for conflict than we really are.

Now, it is true that we have some serious problems going on, and are vehemently divided in the USA at the moment, with some actual riots and violence. I don't want to be dismissive of that. But I believe social media is still a magnifying glass over all our troubles, not a true barometer of our collective readiness to get into physical combat over our differences.

It is nothing less than exhausting to watch how people who frequent various types of social media have been driven to devolve into the worst humanity has seen in a long time short of causing physical harm to each other. I have watched as a couple of local FB groups that I used to just monitor for local information go down to the gutter on almost every single post.

People who live locally and send kids to some of the same schools say the most vile things imaginable to each other. I have no clue if they realize they are doing so with their full identity on display to the world (a lot of people have no sense of privacy settings and so their entire FB profile and posts are there for the world to see).

I am convinced that this has played a part in the insane behavior we have witnessed during the protests of the last several weeks. I have no problem with protests of any kind and for any reason. It's important to be heard. However, when the behavior turns criminal, with destruction of property, private or public, violence beatings and full-on anarchy, well, there is no society on earth and across history where that is considered legal or even acceptable behavior. Even stuff like invading restaurants and yelling at people with megaphones inches away from their ears.

It's only a matter of time until those on the receiving end of this behavior respond with equal or greater (likely greater) brutality. Where do we go from there?

Notice that I am not taking any sides here. These statements apply to all players in this sick game, regardless of affiliation.

And then you have politicians and professional manipulators pinging segments of the population into resonance every day in support of political goals. Political goals, BTW, don't necessarily align with what is good for a country or a region. All they align with is being elected, reelected, obtaining or maintaining power. They could not care less about any of us.

And so, the internet, that thing that most of us thought would bring forth a new age of enlightenment is being weaponized in unimaginable ways. If there was a bill to shutdown Facebook and Twitter tomorrow I would vote for it ten times if I could. As I have said in other posts, they should be shutdown until they can prove their algorithms stop driving people into dark caves of hatred and outrage. That's all they do.

The have optimized their platforms to shove someone into whatever it is they are looking for deeper and harder, without regards for what the content can be. No problem if you are researching home remodeling or how to sail, huge massive problem if you are clicking through political crap (which is usually negative and hateful) and end-up in a deep dark cave of hatred. I've written before about a couple of members of our family who have been driven so far and deep into these caves (one on the left, the other on the right) that it is now impossible to pull them out. It's a drug, and we are powerless against it.

I am for small government. Definitely. However, there are cases where use of force through government is justified. I believe this to be one such case. These companies need to be put on hold until they become good citizens of the world and that needs to happen very soon.

Basically all current social media ends up optimizing for creating outrage, spawning mobs, less thoughtful discussion and more vitriolic arguments, etc. It's becoming a real concern to me that this is going to drive us into some kind of civil war or something if we don't find some way to check it.

Outrage-driven profit models existed before social media as such. Once known as tabloids and the guttered press, this kind of media existed a while before Facebook. William Randolph Hearst was credited with starting the Spanish-American war back in the day (as fictionalized in Citizen Kane). This is to say the "outrage complex" extends well beyond social media platforms though such platforms certainly serve to accelerate it.

Even HN has this problem where the users themselves stoke outrage in certain topics. For example, 99% of threads are see are great with in-depth discussion and nuanced opinions, even on topics that get flamed on other social media: climate change, gender issues, divisive art and personalities. However, lately I've noticed a huge disconnect between these threads and anything that mentions China/TikTok or solar/wind energy. For some reason, these two specifically seem to push people into baring their teeth.

A little over 10 years ago I started a social network for neighborhoods. Instead of people joining the network, houses would join, and people proved they lived in a house by having us send them a postcard with a code on it. Incidentally, while searching for a domain, I even tried to track down and buy "nextdoor.com," which I learned a year or so later had been in stealth mode.

I first did a small launch in my own neighborhood to tune the product before going broad. It was during this phase that I discovered the toxicity of social networks. I was either a witness to, or drawn into, every petty bickering match on my side of my zip code. I am certain my product gave a wider voice to the wrong people. I should have known; ten years earlier I was an officer of my homeowners association, and it was the same thing, but face-to-face.

This wasn't the only reason I shut down the project, but it was the biggest. I thought I'd be bringing people together. I was right, but I had incorrectly assumed that doing so would be a good thing.

Interestingly, I joined Nextdoor expecting to see exactly that: complaints and bickering. I was surprised that most people in there are nice and supportive of each other. I'm sure there's some kind of moderation.

bringing people together is right, but it's not enough. you also have to set the tone, and block out hostility from the start.

one way to do that is to make friends with neighbors, one at a time. if there is a conflict, help solve that conflict friendly and peacefully. develop a reputation for a friendly atmosphere. have neighboorhood activities, for adults or children, work on causes such as cleaning up the neighborhood, fixing play ground equipment, helping neighbors with difficulties. effectively you need to build the community.

the thing is, this can only be done by people who live there, and the tools used are almost secondary. any chat room will do. the barrier to join is not a proof of address but a proof of goodwill, verified by an existing member.

I am certain my product gave a wider voice to the wrong people.

I think normal balanced people are not that talkative in public forums.

It's us, the slightly broken ones (and the totally unhinged idiots and bigots and so on) that comment much on social media...

I wonder if there’s a fair way to throttle people to make them think a bit more about whether it’s worth it.

The first couple I can think of could be gamed or result in metric dysfunction.

I'd say:

- Using one's actual name AND photograph (to introduce some exposure and shame into the game)

- In-group ramifications for in-group bad behaviour

Facebook is a pretty good example of how neither of those things actually help, and if anything only amplify the harm that comes to marginalized people who have good reasons to not use their real names or faces.

I vaguely remember a stunt where Koko the Gorilla was used in a mass-chat on AOL. The crowd, enthused at talking to another species for the first time, would ask things like, "Is there a god?" and "What is the meaning of love?"

Koko would reply, "Apple juice" and wander away.

Social media is a bit like running this experiment with "the mob." Maybe it has a mind and profound thoughts and we can have a discourse with it?

Our expectations for enlightened dialogue are sometimes a bit too high.

people think it's the social networks that are toxic. It's not. It's people. People are.

If I design a city whose main artery is a highway where traffic grinds to a halt for two hours every day at 6 o'clock, I'm going to see frequent incidents of road rage. The takeaway there isn't "people are toxic", it's just "people can be toxic when they're stuck in traffic"

People behave in predictable ways in specific environments. Social media brings out the same side of human nature as does a blank wall and a Sharpie in a gas station men's room.

Just turns out there are a tonne of environments that make people behave in toxic ways.

People pretty much are toxic.

It would be a real service to society IMO if we could find a way to somehow generate enough engagement and energy to challenge the big players without the outrage culture.

I'm not being cheeky (see below), but this already exists. It's talking to one another, person to person. :)

Social media, at its core, targets the very primal part of our brain and bodies. This is my feeling and observation, and I would be very interested to see if there have been studies that show there are fundamental differences to how people communicate online, primarily via text, versus communicating in person. I would suspect there are differences in that our brain literally responds differently.

As I type this, you can't see me. You don't know me. And I can't see nor do I know you. We can't respond to facial expressions or hear the cadence and tone of voice. Many, many times on the Internet, conversations get sidetracked by someone making a joke and then someone taking it too seriously. That's a simple case of online social media interaction, and there are far more complex examples. It's the same thing as working at a company. Often times you hit this moment where you just stop typing a message or an e-mail and just call the other person or go over to their desk. Even with just voice-to-voice communication, things are communicated much faster, and in person is even faster.

A lot of this has to do with the process. Online, someone types something and then someone else types another thing in response and so on. In person, it's a more dynamic exchange.

So at the core, my hypothesis is that almost all media (such as news) and especially social media are doing nothing but bypassing our natural filters and sensors for understanding things and try to directly target our inner primal self. As we can see online, humans are innately primal, especially when you remove all of our other evolved methods of understanding and empathy. When people see someone online say something they vehemently disagree with, they immediately ignore all possibilities and empathetic responses. We go straight to the core of finding the thing we hate about what they just said and then let them know that. However, if a stranger on the train says something like this, we often let it go. If we do engage, we are much more empathetic about their feelings and thoughts, both for human and societal reasons.

Given this, I think it's essentially impossible to build an online community that is directly based upon this type of communication. It's tough enough to build one in person with people you know. And as we've all experienced over the past months, even digital face-to-face communication is hard. There's still dynamics missing like low-latency, body language, tone, hand motions, subtleties of voice, etc.

I view it as an API or architecture diagram. If one drew one out for human communication, there's a lot of abstraction built upon our inner primal workings. But modern media, the Internet, and now social media has given a way to bypass all of that. The inner core can be accessed directly via advertisements, news, social media, propaganda, forums, etc., and now the Internet is like a connection between all these primal cores. It's why it's so insane.

Adam Curtis' documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace covers this.

I agree with pretty much all of this.

The difference in what I'm saying is that I'm starting to think that it's just not enough to tell people to interact face to face instead. We've built all of these outrage-amplification machines that work so very well at demanding our attention. Requests to be nice to each other or abandon them have the problem of not being outrageous enough to stick in our minds and spread on a large scale.

What's the solution then? I don't really know. Maybe we'll all just get tired of it at some point. Maybe some unforeseeable event will happen that will make us put the worst of it aside and unite after all. Maybe the Government should regulate it all somehow - though in the climate they've created, it's hard to hope that we'd be able to do something that's a net benefit overall. Or maybe it'll all just keep growing until it blows up in our faces somehow.

I think about it quite differently —- “outrage culture” has always existed. White flight, lynchings of black men suspected of rape, “mob justice”, “community justice”.

Because we saw that this was a dead end, we created institutions whose purpose was justice. Their mission was unfulfilled because the justice was not meted out equally, and this racist backlash in the form of outrage culture fought against it strongly (still does).

A few things have changed though — before 24/7 news we didn’t have constant, unfiltered access to a stream of all that was wrong in the world. People with differing opinions to us ranging from benign to hateful, constant tragedy, etc.

And additionally, due to the rot of our democratic institutions (unions, etc.) and the growing imbalance of power between everyday people and elites, people are starting to turn towards outrage culture as a solution to societal ills again. And so the calls for “community justice” and the sort return as well. The difference this time is that social media has democratized access to a voice. So now anyone and any cause can be fought for, and with minimal effort.

Fixing social media won’t fix outrage culture, it will just mean that the only people with the power utilize it will be financial and racial elites.

If we want to get rid of it entirely, we need to make our society more democratic.

social media has democratized access to a voice

Social media could be better at democratization by increasing transparency and building better moderation tools.

People were always like this. You just weren't able to see it, because you were in an offline "filter bubble" of peaceful and reasonable people. There have been countless civil wars in history after all.

No, what online media are doing is massive propaganda at scales and levels of insidiousness unlike ever imaginable before now. Cambridge analytica for instance targeted ads at people to maximize their outrage toward other citizens. Before advertisements were much easier to avoid or ignore and weren’t being used for outrage. Ads have to get clicks nowadays for revenue and in the past they just had to be associated with wide viewership. People click on what infuriates them more often than other content.

Long before the internet there were people generating enough outrage in a society to slaughter millions of people on flimsy or no basis. I don’t think this is anything new.

If anything, it offers a counterbalance: you can also communicate with groups of reasonable people not physically proximate to you.

Not in the postwar West, and that's the area where the change we're talking about is notable, so your point is actually an argument for the opposite conclusion.

Iraq? Vietnam? Surely those count as slaughtering massive numbers of people on flimsy bases.

But yes that trend seems to be slowing down, which I'd attribute to the splintering of mass media. Are we actually becoming more divided, or are we just becoming more aware of divisions because we're all more connected?

For sure those count. I mean domestically. Obviously we do things abroad that we would never tolerate at home, and that's one of the biggest problems with our society. Nonetheless the domestic situation has been stable for a long time, and if the foundation cracks there, it will be notable.

Just because the medium is more diverse doesn’t mean it’s much different.

In 2009, the NYT started a series called “Disunion”, a day-by-day look back to the Civil War 150 years prior. Filled with sampled newspapers, opinion pieces, letters to the editor.

After a couple of months, it was quite clear how a country tore itself apart. They didnt need ads or FB, all they needed were the paper owners and the editors. They actually paused the series because (imo) the things said about Lincoln in 1859 and Obama in 2009 were quite similar.

Perhaps to some extent. There is always a baseline level of division and conflict. But I do believe there are things that can be done to amplify or suppress division in a society. I think we're leaning real hard on the amplification of division right now. None of this stuff has been around long enough to get an overall feeling on the effect it has on a society that has it versus a similar level society that does not, so it's hard to say for sure what the effect will be. I have a bad feeling about it though.

On the flipside - Let's not act like ycombinator doesn't benefit from hn. YCombinator gets free advertising to a TON of good engineers for their companies roles (the posts that you can't comment on that mention X random ycombinator company is looking for Y role). Surely that has to be worth something...

I don't disagree with pg's statement here, but IMO yc gets pretty big benefit from running the forum.

Presumably one or two good hires would more than compensate for years of running HN, but forum moderation is still a difficult and stressful job.

is dang paid to do this? how does it work?

Mods, thank you all for saving the day every day. Thank you a hundred times. (On behalf of these 99% of lurkers that benefit your work the most but never say anything.) (Flag this.)

Yes! Dang is doing such a great job. We tend to have really awesome discussions here and for the first few months on this site, I didn't even realize it was moderated. Hats off to him.

I want to chime in and agree with this. Thank you dang and sctb. You guys are amazing.

(Is sctb still a moderator? Looks like his last post was 8 or so months ago.)

Alas, Scott left. Normally we'd both have posted more prominently about that, but it happened at an especially difficult time and that simply wasn't possible. (He's fine, I'm fine, and we're fine, in case that suggested otherwise.)

Dang does a good job? He does a good job of shutting down discussion that strays from the leftist agenda. Deleting anything that doesn't conform to the SV brand of wokeness while leaving up comments from leftist extremeists.

It has become impossible to talk about anything slightly controversial that detractors don't even try since they'll just get downvoted and flagged into oblivion.

since they'll just get downvoted and flagged into oblivion.

That's other users, not dang.

What part about running HN stressed him out?

I understand that HN postings and comments used to form part of the assessment process for prospective YC candidates. Is that still the case?

Not really. Actually, it didn't ever really. pg would sometimes recognize a username and that was about it.

Loved the comment On the tweet from Rob ‘CmdrTaco’ Malda

I honestly think the only solution is for individuals to recuse themselves from those networks (I say on one of those networks), lower the trust they place in digital information, etc. It's become clear that the downward spiral is intrinsic to the medium itself (or possibly just the scale). I don't believe that any amount of technology, or product-rethinking, or UX will change that. We just weren't meant to interact this way. My only hope is that people eventually get disenchanted or burned-out enough that they simply stop engaging.

I replied to the original tweet too ("what would you do if you were Jack Dorsey?"). I said I'd shut the whole thing down.

Sadly, the level headed people recuse themselves which only adds to the toxicity.

Actually what happens is the level headed people on one side of an issue divide recuse themselves, leaving a "seemingly level-headed consensus echo chamber" behind. IMHO, that's worse. This account exists largely to counter exactly that trend. It's important (to me) that newcomers to the site don't get the idea that "hackers" are all fringe libertarians on every non-technical subject.

This site may feel like a "consensus echo chamber" but in reality it is nothing remotely close to that. I think you may be running into the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Since you report noticing fringe libertarians, we can be sure that you dislike fringe libertarianism. We can also be sure that they have just the opposite picture of HN, since everyone crafts their picture in the image of what they dislike, without realizing that they're doing that. It just feels like an objective picture. I can list dozens of examples of this, but I'll restrain myself for once and spare you.

Unfortunately, these extremely contradictory subjective images of HN seem to be a consequence of its structure, being non-siloed: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... This creates a paradox where precisely because the site is less divisive it feels more divisive—in the sense that it feels to people like it is dominated by their enemies, whoever their enemies may be. That's extremely bad for community, and I don't know what to do about it, other than post a version of this comment every time it comes up.

Thanks for caring about level-headeness, in any case.

The sensitivity with which you replied just tells me I'm probably right about this. I assure you that, having dealt with HN readers in real life contexts on both sides of that divide, that the perception absolutely isn't symmetric. HN is seen as a "safe space" for some demographics and definitely as hostile by others. (Edit: I'll just say it. I've had multiple conversations with real life women where I have to make excuses for the perspective of posters here and explain why it's still a valuable forum anyway.)

I mean, I agree with you that we all have biases and blind spots in our perception. Which means... so do the mods. I comment because I want HN to continue to be a site that people like me want to comment on. The site that "people whose comments dang likes" want to comment on surely looks different.

I totally empathize with what it's like to try to defend HN as a worthy place to participate when you're talking with someone who has extremely strong feelings about how awful it is, and the fact that you're willing to do that makes me feel much more sympathy and common ground with you than any disagreement we may have on other points.

But I think your explanation of why this is is much too simplistic. The difference seems to be that you aren't being bombarded every day with utterly contradictory extremely strong feelings about how awful it is. If you were, you wouldn't be able to write what you just posted. Your judgment that the perception "isn't symmetric" is wildly out of line with what I encounter here, so one of us must be dealing with an extremely skewed sample. Perhaps you read more HN posts and talk to a wider variety of people about HN than I do. From my perspective, the links below are typical—and there are countless more where these came from. Of course, there are also countless links claiming exactly the opposite, but since you already believe that, they aren't the medicine in this case. I sample that list when responding to commenters who see things this way:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729568

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17197581

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23429442

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20438487

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032682

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19471335

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937781

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627676

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15388778

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20956287

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15585780

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BetterThanSlave

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=slamdance

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915

A sample email, for a change of pace: "It's clear ycombinator is clearly culling right-wing opinions and thoughts. The only opinions allowed to remain on the site are left wing [...] What a fucking joke your site has become."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20202305

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18664482

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16397133

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546533

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15752730

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20645202

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21325122

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23719343

The problem is that as a moderator those type of posts get your attention. The outliers are the ones you worry about. As someone who participates I basically ignore those. There will always be complain posts even when everything is perfect. People might have had a bad day or there might be another reason for their reaction.

They are outliers in intensity only. They are not outliers in terms of the underlying phenomenon of how users arrive at their generalized perceptions of HN. On the contrary, the phenomenon itself is routine and typical. I would even call it universal.

If you see a comment complaining about "(Apple|Google|Microsoft) fanboys", that's much the same thing. The only actual information in such a comment is about the commenter—specifically, what they dislike (in this case, (Apple|Google|Microsoft)) and therefore what they notice and assigned greater weight to.

Such commenters routinely produce entirely opposite outputs about the exact same input set. Indeed their complaints are interchangeable except for the direction of bias they're complaining about. This phenomenon is so reliable that I'm not sure I've seen any more reliable phenomenon on HN. There is clearly a deep cognitive bias underlying it. I've done my best to try to explain what that is. I'd be interested in hearing other explanations, but so far most responses seem to deny the phenomenon, which from my perspective can't possibly be correct.

Where I think being a moderator makes a big difference is that we get bombarded with these contradictory complaints every day, often in personally abusive ways. You can't help but notice the contradictions when you're getting bashed for one reason one minute and than bashed for exactly the opposite reason the next. When one side calls you Hitler and the other side calls you Stalin, and each side complains bitterly how you ban everyone they agree with and moderate in the other's favor, the only sane response is to become curious about how the exact same thing can result in such an extreme variance in perception.

I think there is a solution to this problem. If moderator decisions are made and recorded publicly then the data can at least be analyzed objectively. If there is indeed a bias then someone should be able to sit down and do the statistical analysis and show that "Yes, X type of stories / comments are more consistently flagged / removed / downvoted / etc." or "No, there is actually no bias in this instance".

I think there is contention right now because moderator decisions are opaque so people come up with their own narratives. Without actual data there is no way to tell what type of bias exists and why so it's easy to make up a personal narrative that is not backed with any actual data.

User flagging is also currently opaque and a similar argument applies. If I have to provide a reason for why I flagged something and will know that my name will be publicly associated with which items I've flagged then I will be much more careful. Right now, flagging anything is consequence free because it is opaque.

Not just made and recorded publicly, but easily searchable and aggregated.

I completely understand, believe me I get it—but based on everything I've seen, it's a hopelessly romantic view. If I've learned one thing, it's that people are going to "come up with their own narratives", as you aptly put it, no matter what we do. Adding energy into that would only create more pressure and demand on a system which is maxed out already.

Making this mistake would lead to more argument, not less—the opposite of what was intended. It would simply reproduce the same old arguments at a meta level, giving the fire a whole new dimension of fuel to burn. Worse, it would skew more of HN into flamewars and meta fixation on the site itself, which are the two biggest counterfactors to its intended use.

Such lists would be most attractive to the litigious and bureaucratic sort of user, the kind that produces two or more new objections to every answer you give [1]. That's a kind of DoS attack on moderation resources. Since there are always more of them than of us, it's a thundering herd problem too.

This would turn moderation into even more of a double bind [2] and might even make it impossible, since we function on the edge of the impossible already. Worst of all, it would starve HN of time and energy for making the site better—something that unfortunately is happening already. This is a well-known hard problem with systems like this: a minority of the community consumes a majority of the resources. Really we should be spending those making the site better for its intended use by the majority of its users.

So forgive me, but I think publishing a full moderation log would be a mistake. I'll probably be having nightmares about it tonight.

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23656311

Absolutely not.

There are 2 mods running HN. Responding to people is TAXING - as in its hugely costly. And it has some terrible edge cases which destroy the process:

The costly occasions are when you meet people who are either

a) Angry

b) Rule lawyers

c) malignantly motivated

AT this point their goal is to get attention or apply coercive force on the moderation process.

These guys are an existential threat to the conversational process and one of the win conditions is to get people to turn against the moderators.

Social media is a topic that HN gets wrong so regularly, and without recourse to research or analysis so frequently that I would avoid discussing moderation in general here.

The fact is that if people are arguing in good faith, we can have some amount of peace, and even deal with inadvertent faux pas and ignorance, provided you never reach an eternal september scenario.

But bad faith actors make even this scenario impossible.

I have to say, that first one gave me a laugh. HN is a "leftist echo chamber?" Considering how the political range of HN runs from center left to bordering on far right, that doesn't hold water. You can't talk about anything on the political spectrum to the left of Bernie Sanders, who, in Europe, would be a rather tame social democrat. But, I guess y'all like UBI and land value taxes, so, sure, it's totally a leftist echo chamber. :P

Dan, I assume you quickly pulled this list of URLs out of a huge bunch of bookmarks related to how hn functions and is perceived by its users. (the alternative, that these mostly negative comments related to your moderation etched themselves in your memory in such a way that you were able to search them out quickly, seems both sad and highly unlikely)

I wonder if you've got a plan for the knowledge and information you're accumulating related to the function and moderation of hn, and sites like it. Have you written about your experience moderating hn?

I started collecting them years ago after posting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110004. After a while that joke felt a little mean, but I kept adding to the list because I found it to be a stabilizer for my own sanity. When someone accuses you of Hitler it helps to review the Stalins and vice versa. It frames the situation differently and makes it a little easier to calm down and hopefully react better.

I haven't written much about my experience moderating HN. Occasionally little blobs squeeze out under pressure. Also, I'm not sure I could describe it very well. It might take more of a novelist's skill to explain the experience. I'd probably just use a lot of words like "surreal" that don't say anything, or come up with metaphors that are good for venting but again, don't really explain much.

What I do want to do is distill the moderation explanations I've posted over the years into a sort of expanded FAQ or commentary. If anyone has noticed how often I post HN Search links to past explanations (which I hope is not too annoying), that's because the explanations have converged over the years, on I'd guess at least a couple dozen different significant issues. Things like how we moderate politics on HN, how it's not ok to insinuate astroturfing, how we handle reposts, and so on.

Dang, I respectfully disagree.

Just the other day I noticed HN take a heavy hand on removing an article that hit the homepage about a virologist publishing a paper that suggested the only logical explanation for COVID is that it’s manufactured.

There are absolutely topics and perspectives that are not welcomed on HN, as the lead moderator it would be unwise in my opinion to think otherwise (given your biases would be the most threatening to an open forum) and you naturally would have a tough time identifying the absence of a perspective you don’t share.

As an example, I would challenge you to pick five articles that discuss unions that hit the homepage on HN and see what % of threads (and how much of the up vote they accounted for) were inherently anti union. I would also be sure to give only partial credit for threads that added boiler plate sentences saying something along the lines of “while I believe in the value of XYZ” because that’s basically a requirement to take any contrarian (to liberal / Silicon Valley ideology) or conservative view on this site. I can give you a laundry list of topics that will show this trend.

From my (biased) perspective (and from someone outside of the valley reading this site religiously for 13 years) HN is increasingly hostile to certain perspectives (and I’m not talking about social issues here). I don’t care much about it - I just opt out - which is the point.

Why not run a poll about it?

What was the article? Now I'm curious

Google around and you will find it. To me it makes no difference whether it was or wasn’t, what was eye opening was the speed of it hitting and being removed.

It’s the unwillingness to even allow the topic on HN which intrigued me. Believing what I believe (ie my bias) I was surprised it got as far as it did - because I know that’s not the HN community party line - and then noticed it disappeared within seconds of me seeing it on home page. I was the first to comment on it so it couldn’t have been because the threads descended into a flame war and I was unaware of which other guidelines it could have broken given it was a legit site referencing a legit paper in a legit journal (but taking a perspective the broader Hn community won’t tolerate).

it was a legit site referencing a legit paper in a legit journal

It wasn't. the article explained how they couldn't find a publisher for it. That's why I flagged it, because that's a red flag.

It was also based on the statistical fallacy that Feynman once summed up with "There is a car with license plate GH02B [a sequence with no meaning] outside. What are the odds?!"

Probably "The most logical explanation is that Covid-19 comes from a laboratory" https://www.minervanett.no/corona/the-most-logical-explanati...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23725966 (flagged, 18 points, 8 days ago, 4 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23727763 (10 points, 8 days ago, 3 comments)

[Personal opinion: The evidence is not enough to prove that is was created/improved/selected in a lab. It has a few "lucky" features, but normal coronavirus don't cause pandemics, so we already know it is a "lucky" case.]

18 points by haltingproblem 8 days ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments

"

It seems to me that you're confirming my point by making a strong generalization about HN based on what you noticed and disliked. I assure you that the people who dislike the opposite things notice the opposite things and make the opposite strong generalization.

If you're talking about the covid submissions that gus_massa came up with, they were flagged by users. In one case we lessened the penalty and the other looks like one we didn't see. I do think that it's unlikely that HN can have a curious conversation about that theme, much as we might both prefer otherwise. I don't think you can validly draw significant general conclusions from that.

A poll wouldn't convince anybody. It would just reconstitute the same disagreement at a meta level. I wrote about something similar here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23239793. (Edit: and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808089 in this thread, as it turns out.)

For the record: I rather think that comment validates my view. This is what you're hearing: "This guy is complaining that you took down a winger conspiracy theory that got upvoted, therefore HN must be balanced."

Here's what I hear: "A winger conspiracy theory goes to the top of the HN front page before being taken down! That means that the voting population of HN is horrifically skewed."

See the difference in perspective? I'm happy you take conspiracy stuff down, I really am. But I'm not happy about the population that pushes it finding a home here, which they clearly have.

That's not what I heard.

You're drawing extremely skewed conclusions about the "voting population" of HN. One of those posts made it to #16 before being flagged, the other did not make the front page at all. It takes only a handful of votes to make the front page (much of the time, anyhow—it's complicated), and #16 is not high—any sensational story can easily get that far before being flagged down (and by the way, it was users who flagged it down, not us).

HN is a large enough population sample that you'll find that scale of upvoters upvoting anything, some of the time. You can't conclude anything significant about the "voting population" of HN from that, and the fact that you're doing so strikes me as an indication of what I'm arguing—that your generalizations about HN are determined by your own ideological priors, just as people with opposite ideological commitments arrive at the opposite generalizations, and by exactly the same mechanism.

I think you'd arrive at the same conclusion that I have, if you were forced as I have been to look at all sides of this under unrelenting personal pressure. I also think that I'd be arriving at your conclusion if I hadn't been forced to have this experience. That's a pessimistic conclusion—it means that rational discussion of this is probably not possible. (I mean that structurally—not a personal swipe but exactly the opposite, and I hope that's clear.)

First of all, I'd like to thank the moderator dang. I don't always agree, nor do I expect to agree. I'm comfortable with disagreements.

If we are serious about avoiding echochamber effects, then we shouldn't take voting so seriously. What is wrong with having a polite disagreement? Why should we value popularity?

Have we reached a point where we cannot discuss certain topics as adults? If so, can those individuals not simply choose to opt-out of the discussions?

I didn't read the discussion in question, but I don't understand what stopping a discussion solves. From my perspective discussions should be stopped when they are needlessly toxic, when participants can no longer advance their ideas politely. Humans have limitations, sometimes emotions become too hot. I appreciate when dang closes these types of discussions.

An illegitimate reason to censor would be to remove ideas which cannot be countered, but the reader disagrees with. Some people find disagreements and discussions disturbing. Others enjoy the opportunity to challenge their ideas, as a matter of 'intellectual curiosity'. Some simply relish in the tactics of formulating arguments, regardless of the underlying position.

I'd have to disagree. I've noticed a growing trend of comments like [1] getting upvoted rather than flagged despite making some awful remarks. I don't think it has anything to do with HN being 'non-siloed' because that would be the same argument as on Twitter or Facebook which mostly lack silos as well.

To make an unflattering comparison, Gab and the like are also non-siloed. But that doesn't stop a site from having an innate level of bias to the userbase. The nature of any forum on the internet is that it will cultivate a certain type of userbase over time. Obviously I'm not the greatest one to speak here because I definitely trend more towards the asshole side of the spectrum but I think it's something to be aware of.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23743914

That's extremely bad for community, and I don't know what to do about it

If I were to start a site for online discussion, I would probably not even try to foster a sense of community in the participants.

Although is quite unhealthy for most people not to belong to a community, the human need for belonging is not so pressing that the average person cannot afford to participate a few hours a week on a site that has no hope of ever providing belongingness.

One advantage of having a T/V distinction in a language is that one can set the tone of a site by the address used, informal for "chummy aligned community" (belonging over contributing) and formal for "respectful diverse community" (contributing over belonging). Fortunately english has a formal "you" which we could use to demonstrate that this site is a community of inquiry among diverse opinions, not a community of like-minded folk. Unfortunately english no longer has the informal "thou"[1] so that signal is worth exactly zero bits.

[1] Don't thee thou me, thee thou thissen, and 'ow tha likes thee thouing.

Also, in the old days, T/V was asymmetric. If A V'd B, B T'd A. These days we use symmetric address, so either A and B T each other or they V each other. (if A are a business advertising, the choice of V or T implicitly segments their market. Some businesses wimp out and advertise in english to avoid making any decision.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T–V_distinction

As a German speaker, I can assure you that T/V doesn't necessarily say something about the level of politeness or respect in a discussion. I have witnessed newspaper comment sections or Facebook threads where people would V each other but still say very rude things.

Don't start a forum.

HN certainly has its faults, but it has also helped numerous people improve their skills, find better jobs, share insights, start startups, build companies. There should be no doubt that HN is a net positive, and if you can't see that, then you are part of the problem with social media: you're so focused on the negative aspects of a subject that you've lost perspective.

We need more and better forums, not fewer.

Are we at a point where dividing HN into smaller communities is beneficial? I know there are Show HN, Ask HN, Who is Hiring, etc? I want to see a section for DIY/personal projects and maybe even AMAs.

I hope not. I like HN just the way it is. It's a simple text message board with good moderation.

We don't need to pile on more features for the sake of it. There are plenty of communities for DIY projects and AMAs.

I really like the plain structure, but I also noted that sometimes it is difficult for the small projects to reach the front page. Please remember to go to https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and upvote interesting small projects.

And https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew, which is much less well known. It's linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/show at the top.

This is great. Is there a new for Ask HN and Tell HN as well?

The key to getting good discussions is to not have a profit motive coupled to eyeballs.

HN doesn't show ads, doesn't care about growth.

Large newspapers had strict firewalls between advertising, journalism and opinion -- but smaller papers had to fold to pressure from advertisers.

Subscription services need eyeballs badly -- but they need paying eyeballs, which means that they need to offer more than just outrage -- but if they don't show at least some of their content for free, they can't grow.

HN doesn't show ads, doesn't care about growth.

Nit: Hacker News shows job ads, and is interested in attracting new users. Just not like your typical VC-funded social media website.

That is plainly insufficient. There's serious outrage, polarization, and lack of nuance on this site about a variety of topics. Privacy, anything google, amazon, or Uber, gender and racial politics, Facebook, etc. There's more going on here than the profit motive.

The problem isn't that these companies want to make a profit. The problem is they make it easy for people to get what they want, and users seek out outrage and polarization. I think that combined with the globalizing tendency of ubiquitous, high bandwidth, low latency, broadcast-capable connections is a real problem. But since I believe it's a human nature thing, I'm much less sure of how to solve it, especially while respecting the free speech value.

Using the fact that CmdrTaco commented in that twitter thread, i want to bring into comment slashdot moderation system. I always thought it was better than simple upvote/downvote because the "tags" (insightful, interesting, flamebait,troll) enticed you to think twice about the modding, preventing knee-jerk nodding reaction.

The fact that often the most voted comments on hacker news are the most extreme (saying something is completely wrong) shows that we love correcting people and will discount a good conversation in place of some virtual approval.

Sometimes I vote something up because I want to see a good counterargument in the replies. Should I not be doing this?

you should vote however you think will foster good discussion, and that sounds like as good a reason as any. another would be voting based on how you think the posts should be ordered from best to worst, regardless of agreement with individual posts.

'voting' doesn't foster good discussion it harms it.

sure, voting can sometimes hinder discussions by collapsing the many dimensions of judgement and value into a single binary, with loads of information loss on the way, but indistinct pronouncements like that are exactly why mechanisms like voting are implemented in the first place, to weed out shallow submissions to give space to more considered ones.

The trouble is normal people are turned off by being downvoted and never post another considered comment.

Sometimes I vote something up because I want to see a good counterargument in the replies. Should I not be doing this?

I usually will up vote something if I can't see an obvious reason why it was downvoted...I've seen too many downvotes for dogmatic reasons and don't really post much here because of this.

I've done this at times to a well-written argument that I disagree with. Could be just basic fairness, hoping to attract somebody to counter-argue, or possibly to help it rise above more poorly-reasoned arguments for the same thing, or even to make my own counter-argument post more visible.

Why don’t you offer your own counter? Just curious

There's serious outrage, polarization, and lack of nuance on this site about a variety of topics.

That doesn't feel like a huge issue here. I see tough topics brought up often and them being passionately discussed, but it generally goes quite civilily. I would not say there is lack of nuance at all - I learn a lot from reading people's counterpoints.

I mean, it's not perfect, but compared to other online discussion areas, it doesn't feel like a total waste of time to get into a nuanced discussion here.

I'm not saying it's relatively terrible here compared to the rest of the internet. I'm more thinking about the stridence of typical discussions, say, pre-1980. Simply, there was not a context where the typical person could go to have or witness aggressive partisan argumentation, be it about a company, a political system, whatever. Certainly, very, very few people could cause their statements to be broadcast to more than a handful of folks. Whereas your humble correspondent has probably gotten hundreds of impressions on these modest thoughts he has posted here. Another thing that wasn't present was the space for those views to feed back on themselves and become more intense, more passionate, and more aggressive.

That doesn't mean everything about the world was better back then. But this one thing was different.

I think it remains to be seen how much all this really matters. We probably won't know until they're writing the history books about this time.

As much as I resist futile internet arguments, I find that I can't help myself when I read someone being blatantly wrong about something I know. I feel some nearly irresistible urge to "correct" them, knowing fully well that my arguments will have no impact.

Here's the thing: before the internet and social media, you simply didn't encounter that many patently false arguments in your day to day life. Everything you read or saw was produced by journalists and writers (not bloggers) who had access to their parent organization's resources. Political bias aside, if a TIME or NYT editor let something go to print, it meant that it had gone through at least some basic fact check.

But that's not true online. Anyone can write anything, facts be damned. And worse, in your social media feed, a carefully researched article occupies the same space as some random guy's harebrained conspiracy theories.

We can't limit the amount of "wrongness" online. Best we can do is learn to live with it

It’s no longer true at those media organizations either, if it ever was.

I don't think YC really has "good discussions" as much as "A large group of people that already agree on most topics, communicating about those topics." And this site breeds just as much outrage as the next.

This is a pretty textbook look into a very unreflective echo chamber.

And, I would add, you can't have any significant discussion about topics which this group of people disagree on. For example, you can't say:

* The "free market," even suitably regulated, is not a good allocator of resources.

* Anything about the actual accomplishments of the Soviet Union or China, such as the USSR going from a purely agrarian society to putting a rocket in space in under 50 years, even while criticizing them for their failures (Uyghur concentration camps, etc.)

* Capitalism is not the best economic system, because it leaves too many people behind.

I could go further, but then I'd be accused of "nationalistic flamebait."

The best conversations I had on the internet predate the like/upvote button. As soon as conversation became about scoring points and not engaging with an individual in a discussion it went to hell.

I can certainly see his point. The more I grow older, the more I am convinced to spend less time on internet interacting with people. Not only the anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is a magnet for toxic people, it also brings out the worst in people. Even disregarding the outright abuse or outrage, the opinions I see on the internet is very hard to meet someone in real life who has that kind of opinions.

Every Google related thread immediately becomes a thread of bashing Google's history of killing products. I don't know how many times people need to have the same conversation again and again. This has gotten to the point that I don't open any Google related threads. I am here to read thoughtful discussions, not some broken records again and again. Internet forum is hard.

Are we sure the civil war isn’t being caused by sychophants like PG himself cozying up to the alt-right while maintaining considerable power over online discourse?

Maybe these are the """hard questions"""[0] that need to be asked, as opposed to calling for a return to the Jim Crow era.

You could easily "turn off" Twitter.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

...PG himself cozying up to the alt-right?

Do you have evidence for this statement?

Here: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

And here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18426853

And here: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474708/does-this-mega...

Perhaps if the queen of Hacker News chose to be clear about his beliefs his minions wouldn’t need to scurry to claim "he doesn’t actually believe this"

It's unfortunate you're getting censored for criticizing Dear Leader.

Yet another reminder of just how creepy the cult of personality HN has around Paul Graham is. Even on an article discussing him, you can't say anything critical without being downvoted and flagged.

In my opinion, losing most HN comments and using just the links would be a great way to browse HN.

Here's some trivial code to accomplish that https://github.com/roshan/hnncnn/blob/master/hnncnn.js

So here's a startup idea: create an HN-like forum for topics that are usually avoided on HN. Such as politics.

And the only way to have a civil politics forum is to have some professional moderator like dang who can step in and explain the rules to anyone who gets carried away a bit too much. Little by little, the users get educated and start enforcing the rules themselves, either via downvotes, or via actual comments.

Wouldn't that be great? In an age of complete political polarization, to have a sanctuary place on the internet where you can go and exchange thoughtful ideas with considerate peers who may or may not share your political alignment, but treat you with respect.

Have you seen this subreddit? https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/

Forums are very hard to start. You need a catalyst. HN’s was YC - that’s the bar.

Thank you, this looks nice. Do you know something similar for /r/worldnews? Something that's more like what you shared and /r/askhistorians.

Is it possible that we're overvaluing decorum? While the battles going on over ideas on social media are base --- there is still progress. Ideas are being put through the grinder and being put on display for all sorts of people who might never have had that opportunity a few short years ago.

It's quite possible, that while it's hard to watch, it is just the growing pains of a whole new chapter in the evolution of human thought. One that isn't restricted to sophisticated and polished elites.

Maybe the real problem is our aversion to an all out brawl, rather than the fight itself. It's possible that younger people will just be able to deal with it better -- learn how to better cope with and ignore distractions like trolls etc.

Is it possible that we're overvaluing decorum?

Yes.

Speaking as a minority who sometimes gets downright livid with the responses here to issues where social-issu technology intersect that are simply phrased eloquently and with “proper decorum” but are still pretty deleterious and exclusionary in their markedly disparate impacts and results for people like me-as more emotionally charged (rightfully, I will defend staunchly) comments criticizing such thoughts and opinion turn grey and ultimately get flagged into non-existence.

Speaking as a minority

Thank you for speaking up. I often think of HN as ivory tower. It feels great for people who have zero urgency to address social issues because those social issues don't affect them in any way. In fact, those social issues might give some of us an undeserved advantage.

It's not a surprise when you consider PG's own desires to forever be in an ivory tower and to blame any criticism of his own faults on angry mobs. He's never wrong in his own eyes and it's pretty clear that comes from a position of privilege.

HN does achieve one goal: I do love it as a place to discuss intellectual ideas. It does come at a cost of largely sweeping social issues under the carpet.

I would love to see an HN with many of the same rules but where membership is truly diverse and where minorities outnumber the privileged. An HN started by a minority and that would not have PG's DNA. I imagine it having everything I love about HN and perhaps a lot less of what I dislike about HN.

I'd answer that first question with an emphatic "no", since we already know what happens when decorum goes out the window - we have most other popular forums with a political section to look at. Feelings are hurt, personal attacks come up next, good faith dies, all of those things are anathema to deep discussion. I am aware of no place online, or in real life, where discussion and trolling (or big egos) can coexist.

You don't need sophistication and polish to not be a dick. That's the low water mark, here. Not big words, just please, thankyou, and a willingness to entertain thoughts you disagree with and explain your own.

Some things are urgent and demand outrage. While the Declaration of Independence might at first glance appear to be an example of decoram, it was not. What it said is that we are done entertaining your ideas and will now start to kill those who try to stop us from putting our ideas in place. Outrage is sometimes appropriate.

Not on Hacker News, they're not. There is no point in the history of this website (and I'd argue, most if not all social media sites) where outrage has accomplished anything productive or time-sensitive.

Agreed that nothing is urgent here. It's intentionally an ivory tower. Which is great if society already treats you well.

Veiled insult aside, the point of a discussion forum is for discussion. If something is not conducive to discussion, it doesn't belong there.

I'm not sure how you have a civil discussion about inhumane acts that are supported by an oppressive system. Sometimes the only appropriate reaction is outrage. Just as an example I wouldn't engage in a civil conversation about whether or not to interfere with a rape in progress. When you find people demanding a civil conversation about unacceptable behavior, it's a pretty good sign that the entire point is to tone police the outrage and therfore normalize the oppression. Why should anyone consider for even a second to a demand that you must politely ask someone to stop raping a child? It should be called for what it is: a delaying tactic. We actually need more, not less, outrage for some of the problems society tolerates or even encourages. So what you'd most likely find in a political forum that demands polite interaction are mostly folks who are not oppressed and for which there is zero urgency to change things. What you find elsewhere is often ugly and uncomfortable. The real problem is that no one has solved is an extremely difficult one: when is outrage appropriate? Sometimes it is. Too often outrage is thrown around about trivial issues or towards a specific person in a witch hunt sort of way. What we need is to eliminate that while still allowing for appropriate outrage. For sure the fix is not allowing the privileged and the oppressors to decide what is appropriate . I don't have any solution in mind. But I do hope I've brought some nuanced clarity to how difficult a challenge it is to moderate outrage without silencing appropriate outrage.

I heavily disagree. While outrage at e.g. societal problems might sometimes be appropriate, directing that outrage at forum posters that defend what you call "unnaceptable behaviour" is just a bad idea.

If they actually believe in what they say, you have just further radicalized them. If they don't and just want to provoke, you've played into their hands.

Also, consider if you're actually being honest with yourself. Are the people you are arguing against actually just defending "raping a child"? Giving in to outrage often leads to people ignoring vital parts of the conversation. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-ent...)

If they actually believe in what they say, you have just further radicalized them.

That's classic victim blaming and no one should take these threats seriously. Any further radicalization of a viewpoint is entirely the responsibility of the person with those views.

If they don't and just want to provoke, you've played into their hands.

I agree that's a risk.

Also, consider if you're actually being honest with yourself. Are the people you are arguing against actually just defending "raping a child"? Giving in to outrage often leads to people ignoring vital parts of the conversation.

I agree we have to consider the topic and I did give an extreme example. Yes, I do honestly think some topics that are being debated in society at the moment are just as horrible and as urgent to stop as a child being raped. I also already addressed this in my original comment: "Too often outrage is thrown around about trivial issues or towards a specific person in a witch hunt sort of way."

(https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-ent...)

That article has very little to do with the topic. The author is an expert in marriages and treating people for anger and relationship problems and he goes on to talk about exactly that situation: "Divorce and Being Right". A marriage is ideally a relationship of equals. It has very little to do with an entire group of people being oppressed by society. In most cases we stay in a marriage by choice. There is no easy way to leave society or to replace it with a better alternative.

That's classic victim blaming and no one should take these threats seriously. Any further radicalization of a viewpoint is entirely the responsibility of the person with those views.

I don't really think I am victim blaming here. It is simply a fact that an individual often has influence on the situation where they have been the victim. Example: I would never blame a woman who has visited an area with high crime rates for getting raped there. But I still might advise them to e.g. not visit the area at night. I'm not saying it's fair, but I think it's the smart thing to do.

Same thing here. I assume that any person who is the target of a radical group is at least somewhat interested in not creating more members of that group. I'm not saying it's fair, but I think it's the smart thing to do.

Yes, I do honestly think some topics that are being debated in society at the moment are just as horrible and as urgent to stop as a child being raped.

The key difference is that your example is an issue that allows for immediate action, while (I presume) the issues you are alluding to are of societal and systemic nature. In the analogy, having a civil discussion about the nature of the issue at hand would majorly detract from the victim being rescued. I do not see how this is the case for the actual issues at hand.

That article has very little to do with the topic.

Agreed. I basically wanted to give context to my claim that giving in to outrage might lead to people filtering out valid arguments and context.

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes, which, of course, greatly increases its already high error rate during emotional arousal. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong in some respect.

Mental focus, the foundation of feelings of certainty, distorts reality by magnifying and amplifying one or two aspects of it while filtering out everything else. You might discover more detail about the one or two aspects you focus on, but what you discover will have no contextual meaning, because you have isolated those aspects from their dynamic interaction with the rest of the reality in which they exist. In other words, focus magnifies things out of proportion and blows them out of context.

What I'm trying to get at is that I think it is very possible to discuss a situation that, in the eyes of at least one of the participants of the discussion, is worthy of outrage without actually displaying that outrage and staying civil. To again use rape as an example, I think it is entirely reasonable to consider the experiences, pain and outrage of rape victims and their supporters valid, while still wanting them to be involved in civil discussions about the issues of false accusations and due process. (If they are willing to do so, of course)

Intuitively understand your concerns about groups of oppressed people possibly not feeling welcome in a completely outrage-free environment, but to me that seems totally unverifiable. Someone could argue for the complete reverse and that would probably be just as valid.

It is simply a fact that an individual often has influence on the situation where they have been the victim.

That's victim blaming. And definitely not appropriate when we are talking about society oppressing someone. No one person can control society. And if you belong to a minority, the group you belong to has a much smaller voice when it comes to influencing society.

I assume that any person who is the target of a radical group is at least somewhat interested in not creating more members of that group.

You keep saying that it creates more members of a radical group, but that's not true. No one becomes the member of a radical group just because someone else is outraged that they are suffering from injustice.

And history says you are wrong. From the American Revolutionary war, to the Civil War, the the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and to today's black lives matter movement what we have seen is the opposite: the more outrage there is over social injustice the more people eventually decide that the injustice we tolerated in the past is no longer acceptable. When you see conservative four star generals speak up and say we have to do something about racial justice in the USA, you know that the outrage has finally worked. We are on our way to fixing things. The vast majority of the US is moral. And as uncomfortable as outrage might be to us at first, we eventually do listen.

That's victim blaming. And definitely not appropriate when we are talking about society oppressing someone. No one person can control society. And if you belong to a minority, the group you belong to has a much smaller voice when it comes to influencing society.

I genuinely do not understand how someone could possibly claim that simply acknowledging that a victim has influence on their situation is already victim blaming. It's horrible that people even have to think about how best avoid being victimized, yes totally. They should not have to. But that does not mean it should be impermissible to suggest ways they can act in their best interest.

You keep saying that it creates more members of a radical group, but that's not true. No one becomes the member of a radical group just because someone else is outraged that they are suffering from injustice.

I'm not convinced. Many people convert to radical groups because they feel ostracized by the mainstream. Screaming "FUCK YOU RACIST! GO DIE" at a forum poster will only push them further right. Engaging with "I think you are mistaken, here is why" might cause them to reconsider at least part of their worldview.

And history says you are wrong. From the American Revolutionary war, to the Civil War, the the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and to today's black lives matter movement what we have seen is the opposite: the more outrage there is over social injustice the more people eventually decide that the injustice we tolerated in the past is no longer acceptable.

Would you disagree that there might be a better way of achieving change than letting it spiral into an all-out war? That seems a bit accelerationionist-y and I presume that's not what you actually want.

We are on our way to fixing things.

I think your optimism is a bit premature.

I genuinely do not understand how someone could possibly claim that simply acknowledging that a victim has influence on their situation is already victim blaming.

The dangerous neighborhood example is such a classic that it's easy to find. Items 5 and 9 on this list: https://msmagazine.com/2013/05/28/rape-splaining-10-examples...

Screaming "FUCK YOU RACIST! GO DIE" at a forum poster will only push them further right.

No it won't. What you are advocating for is tone policing. You are claiming that reasonable outrage is going to radicalize people and therefor people should not express anger when they have every right to be angry. "If she had calmed down, I wouldn't have hit her". Classic abuser and oppressor excuse.

Would you disagree that there might be a better way of achieving change than letting it spiral into an all-out war?

Yes there is a better way. People should listen to outrage and fix things before it's too late. That onus is on the oppressor. Exactly what I've said all along.

I think your optimism is a bit premature.

Time will tell. When formerly silent conservatives start joining progressives and all are with one voice saying "we must fix this", it's a damn good sign.

I love hacker news and attained a lot of knowledge from this. I’m just curious how much traffic does HN gets

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808787

TIL: That PG agrees that the source for Twitter’s toxicity is the pursue of engagement at all costs. Those recommendation algorithms that surface content that triggers people’s emotions and spur divisiveness are clearly one of the main reasons why citizens in the USA are at war among themselves.

I do wonder what sort of traffic HN gets in terms of Page view. Would HN consider self hosting an analytic like plausible or other cloud solution where the information is public?

These days around 5.5M page views daily and something like 5M unique readers a month, depending on how you try to count them.

pg used to post graphs sometimes using an old Google API where you could supply all the data points in a URL and it would return an image. Edit: like http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=ls&chco=ff7700,000000..., which still works! via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833276

5M Uniques! 5.5M Daily Views.... This is much much bigger than I imagine.

I sat down and was thinking about these numbers.

Most of the post I could find that share their Data with blog post hitting front page of HN suggest they got less than 100K PV. They do get over 100K aggregate over a few days.

100K Vs 5M. This mildly suggest HN has a very high engagement from its users.

Every forum risk having an Eternal September.

Eternal September is a period beginning in September 1993, the month that America Online (AOL) began offering Usenet access to its many users.

Before then, Usenet was largely restricted to colleges, universities, and other research institutions. Every September, many incoming students would acquire access to Usenet for the first time, taking time to become accustomed to Usenet's standards of conduct and "netiquette". After a month or so, these new users would either learn to comply with the networks' social norms or tire of using the service.

The influx of new users from AOL did not end and Usenet's existing culture did not have the capacity to integrate the sheer number of new users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Can't we leverage this lesson then? If smaller groups can be integrated into the larger one with enough time, then the answer is straightforward. You can have very large internet forums, but new users need to be slowly integrated into the 'culture' piecemeal.

Create a good culture, then break it out and parallelize it. New users get slotted into larger groups to learn the culture, then they can be sent on their way into the larger culture.

Twitter Training Wheels?

Exclusivity has been one of the primary driving factors in most major social web companies... and then at some point they just open the floodgates. I think, barring the extreme freedom of speech side like the chans, a good analysis and use of exclusivity would be a great way to do things. What gives you the "ticket in" is another topic that would take a lot of thinking and would depend on the site and it's goals.

Metafilter has been successful, I believe primarily due to the $5 charge to create a posting account and the warmup period of limitations for new accounts. New accounts trickle in at a manageable level. All account owners get that sense of ownership and care that comes with exchanging currency for something. Most internet brigading can't scale a small expense to begin with, and existing account owners who might otherwise get bootstrapped into a brigade don't want to get kicked out for being a jerk.

SomethingAwful has a similar requirement on spending money for an account, but that's not stopped people from doing dumb things to get muted or banned, keeping the moderators quite busy.

Doesn't Stackoverflow do that? You can't answer immediately, and so on? But something seems to be missing there as that community and culture can be unfriendly.

I go there for answers. I not longer participate. It's not worth the effort.

I started an internet forum in 2006 whose audience was almost entirely female. It grew to a reasonable size, not huge, but what was remarkable was a nearly complete lack of trolls, arguments, and bad behavior. We saw that women just engage differently online, with a premium on expressing positive sentiments and encouraging each other to contribute constructively. Of course I don't want to generalize, but the removal of young men at their testosterone peak age from anonymous forums is remarkable.

I think that women can also be very toxic when given the right incentives.

I saw certain MLM groups where women (and exclusively women, since these MLMs didn't cater to men) would say pretty nasty and offensive things to push their agenda and using the same idea of positivity, encouragement and "female empowerment" and any naysayer will get shut down supposedly because they are being negative or not supportive (completely overlooking the fact that they're hawking a scam).

I am not sure whether women need an external trigger for this (such as the MLM in this example) whether as men tend to do it by themselves, or if you simply got lucky and happened to be surrounded by good people, especially in that early era when computers, internet access (for non-work purposes) and social networking was still relatively niche and acted as a filter compared to nowadays where every idiot has access to all those things.

Good point on the nastiness in the name of positivity. See the askwomen sub on reddit. On some threads EVERY comment is deleted and the topic is closed because people supposedly weren’t being positive/inclusive/whatever enough. Really, every single person?! The moderation is off the rails and it creates an atmosphere of paranoia.

I've been part of new mother forums when my wife was pregnant - the bitchiness and the flexing on each other was massive. Either you were tone deaf to it or some other factor prevented that on your site.

I think it's simply because 2006 was a different (and better) time when it comes to social networking on the internet.

Computers were still more niche, more complex and required more effort to use which acted as a built-in filter; if you invest all this effort into getting onto the forum to participate there's a higher chance that you legitimately want to contribute constructively.

Nowadays, every idiot out there has access to an internet browser and already has a social media account (and can use it to log into most other websites which implement social login for the sake of growth) and start spewing bullshit.

I have noticed a similar trend when it comes to online PC gaming. I used to play a shooter game (Crysis) back in ~2008 and the atmosphere on servers was always great; the chat was respectful, there were actual discussions happening in-game and I haven't seen any disrespect, rage or anger. Nowadays I play Battlefield and the chat is mostly empty, only interrupted by insults and the occasional server info message. Console gaming introduces voice chat and seems dominated by kids swearing their lungs out. I guess back in the day the cost of a machine capable to run these games acted as a filter, where as nowadays everyone has access to them, even those that shouldn't.

I think sometimes people luck out with the right audience. Online gamers have been obnoxious since well before 2008.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 (warning: language)

Perhaps the exorbitant price of a PC that could run Crysis well enough to even think about multiplayer acted as a filtering mechanism?

There's something to this. Online PC gaming communities can be really problematic, but online console gamers tend to be even worse. I think it's the younger age and lower bar to entry.

The CS 1.6 community could be pretty toxic circa 2007. At least in France.

Of course I don't want to generalize, but

But you did, and it makes me sad to see the testosterone blaming stuff here.

To be honest, I do remember online communities being much nicer back then (we're talking 14 years ago here) but things have changed a lot. I feel like strong moderation and guidelines work great (see HN where discussions are mostly civilized) instead of blaming half of the world population from an individual observation which can quickly be debunked by visiting any female-only forum or subreddit in 2020 for example.

Are you saying hormones don’t affect behaviors?

I think you're ignoring a vastly more applicable factor: 2006.

The internet was plenty toxic in 2006.

Yeah, hard to believe without URL, sources or anything. Also, was that just a feeling you had or had you done some kind of measurement?

Source: You know, I have been to Mars back in 2005.

I was part of, and eventually managed an internet forum around the same time.

Male and female were about equal, and no specific issues were more related to either gender.

Just one additional data point.

—-

In my experience, men will generally be overtly hostile/assholes.

Women will be nice to your face and then try to destroy your reputation behind your back.

It’s actually impressive that some groups can all gossip together about the one person that isn’t there, and somehow all expect that they are the exception to that rule (e.g. nobody hates them behind their back). I honestly do not understand how those relationships are supposed to work (but they do, or all of them are just deeply unhappy about the whole thing but don’t know how to leave).

"Don't start a forum" says the guy who helped found two of the most successful ones. Two things can be true here,

1) Running HN stressed out PG

2) Discouraging forum competitors significantly helps YC.

Per YC etiquette, please explain your downvotes.

I don’t think pg is discouraging others from starting a forum. He’s merely saying running a forum has a lot more stress in moderating it than building the technology.

But it could be that dang enjoys what pg found stressful.

I was part of running a community website but I absolutely hated running the admin side of it. I just wanted to build pretty UI and make things work. I absolutely loathed responding to support emails. It drained me out. A non technical friend of ours loved the admin and people side. He would onboard users, write nice how to articles for others, resolve conflicts, respond to suooort emails. He did not care one bit about how it all worked, just that it worked and he could help others get value out of the site.

Some people are good at building things, Some people are great at fostering built things.

"Don't run a forum" - this seems like bad advice.

"Don't run a forum similar with reddit-style popularity rankings" might be a better description.

Running a forum is part of managing a community, where ideas, advice and other positive things can be exchanged. If you're a startup, a community can help seed your initial userbase and give you valuable feedback to see if you're providing value to a group of people.

That doesn't mean there aren't stressors, but I disagree with the blanket "don't do it, it's scary".