Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
If your opinion is already popular, you don't have to be brave: you know it's out there.
If your opinion is unpopular, knowing someone's watching may silence it altogether.
Even strong (executive power) leaders like Mr Xi or Mr Putin do not rule over a monolith.
When the society was mostly anti-gay the government machinery was used to hurt these target homosexual groups. Now that society is pro-gay we see government forcing bakers to bake cake for gay weddings.
I will not be surprised if the surveillance mechanism would be used to hurt Libertarians and anti-government people.
Note: I selected the USSR/KGB not for any particular resemblance to current Western intelligence agencies (much more human intelligence and shotgun mics back then) but rather because they seem to me to be the textbook case of the effects of mass, pervasive surveillance over a long time.
For example when I say Donald Trump is representative of majority of conservative base I do not mean majority of conservative base is narcissist and billionaire. I basically mean Trump is pro-Gun, pro-Life, pro-Christian, anti-Gay. Because without those criteria he would not have entered the funnel in first place.
Conservatives or Liberals the current trend among American politicians is "trust us", "bend before authority", I am 100% sure no person can rise to top in American government if he does not conform to these ideas.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
Open-plan surveillance workspaces are meant to produce monoculture, and a whole generation of programmers has essentially gifted that opportunity to employers by failing to insist upon minimally acceptable working conditions, in favor of an extension of college / dorm life.
One wonders why a staff that is uniformly willing to give up personal time for Whisky Thursday isn't viewed as a liability, in terms of lack of thought diversity.
It makes a lot less sense in knowledge work, where the problems are not standardized and often solutions are unknown. In these cases, the uniformity desired through these surveillance measures makes no sense. It's fundamentally not the same as a McDonald's burger, no matter how much management wishes so.
Worse still, even if you did want homogeneity of software design output, the best way to get it is to give workers conditions in which the environment supports their productivity. Taylorized fast-food kitchens support certain types of productivity and are a rational response to that business need. But it's more of a cargo cult superficiality to try to impose the same idea on a knowledge domain where quiet and privacy are fundamental to the product.
On the other hand, if instead of productivity the employer cares more about having a visually fancy-looking space, as a means for status signaling, or cares about having a good staff on-paper to heighten an acquihire valuation, then open-plan makes more sense. It's bad for the employees though, because of course the employer can't admit to hiring people just for status, show, or credential, so they have to at least feign concern over productivity, thus putting knowledge workers in the bind of having to be productive in a fundamentally anti-productive setting.
Though I still think that regardless what job one is doing (knowledge work or factory), that subconsciously the company wants predictability. So maybe putting people in an environment where it is anti-productive puts people of all skills at the same basic predictable level?
The architects are onshore and have never coded in their lives. They draw boxes on whiteboards and feed UML to offshore dev 'factories'. That UML gets decomposed so that you will have factory lines of developers producing classes (sometimes just methods) in isolation. LOC is frequently used as a productivity measure by their management. It's about as far from software as craft as you can get.
Somehow I don't think that argument would win the day though.
An important distinction to understand.
Generally, dashcam video is extremely difficult to get released if it incriminates or disagrees with the reporting of the police in any way.
That's not really surveillance by any meaningful definition.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/01/29/...
All of those things will happen because it happens all the time with video evidence from dash cams and audio from body mics when it's subpoenaed.
If you make an environment where only those who are willing to face death, imprisonment, or harassment for their ideas are the ones doing the talking, then you make the only voice being heard be one of extreme conviction and cause.
See: witches, anarchists, terrorists, etc
Most people are... But reality is subjective, and the people you call "bad actors" in this case surely thought themselves "good actors." The problem happens when, in your good-actor zeal for righteousness (capturing bad-actors), you inconvenience a large number of good actors in order to more completely capture a small number of bad ones... and thus become a new bad actor.
(I believe this would be called "high recall, low precision" if you know stats or have done any machine learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall and the goal is to maximize both, not just one- also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthews_correlation_coefficie... )
An example of another (IMHO) "high recall, low precision" practice is AML/KYC laws, which find a very small percentage of bad actors at the cost of inconveniencing a large number of good ones (as well as missing some bad actors).
I wish I could assume such but having studied a bit of psychology, I have found no evidence to support such an assumption.
It has some good examples, for example the one about a journalist exposing corruption in high places but who has a secret (like drug abuse in the example). She could be attacked for this secret in order to discredit her exposé on a totally unrelated matter. I think everyone has secrets of some kind, but even if you are not a journalist, you want journalists like this to exist and be free to conduct their investigations. This is why the argument that "you shouldn't be afraid if you have nothing to hide" is bogus.
Related reading:
"The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone's Feelings"
http://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2015/11/the-real-reas...
"The Coddling of the American Mind"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-codd...
"Rage Profiteers: How Bloggers Harness Our Anger for Their Own Gain"
http://observer.com/2014/10/rage-profiteers-how-blogs-harnes...
If I can't have a quiet chat with friends in public making clear I'm a gay, atheist, muslim, vegan, witch, then I'm not free. If I can't have a private chat with any other member(s) of the populace, I'm not free.
Someone will always think I'm living my life wrong.
The majority can be wrong in their opinion after all, like being bigots and racists.
Freedom of expression shield us from the 'wrong' opinions being surpassed, in the hope that they provide corrective feedback more often than not to the population at large.
At least, that's the hope.
People provide racist and divisive commentary to the population at large, no matter how unjustified. No doubt it will change some people opinion.
People also continue to provide anti-vaccine messages, scaring parents and causing public healthcare crisis.
Paradoxically, the lack of political speech is the mark of authoritarians and tyrants in our political life.
Or, for that matter, if you're a fundamentalist Christian, Trump supporter, gay marriage opponent.
One other feature of the study that limits its wider applicability is that it is entirely US-centric. It would be interesting to read follow-up work on samples taken from other cultures and countries.
Even the bootlickers censor their more controversial opinions, leading to a thought monoculture in which there is no dissent of any kind. This should be evidence that mass surveillance and any government which supports it needs to go, pronto.
But those in favor of mass surveillance could answer the study by claiming that if the surveillance is kept secret then 1. it won't stifle minority opinions and 2. it will work better
By saying this they could not only answer the study's concerns but could now advocate zealously punishing whistle blowers.
But even this community suffers from this strange phenomena of "group think" which leads me to go into this spiral of silence.
I often find myself self-censoring or abandoning the comment halfway, because I know it will get down voted and it's just a waste of time.
And I'm not talking about trolling or being aggressive or flaming..
Some opinions are just not accepted here on HN and the comment will get down voted fast regardless of how politely or respectfully you try to put it.
This is my 3rd HN account - I've abandoned the others (with lots of karma on them) specifically as a protest for (what I thought were) valid opinions being down voted and dismissed.
For example, mentioning ideas that some tech might be bad or harmful - that people are addicted to devices, that tech is causing widespread pollution - and the likes - are quickly buried, even though in my view these are subjects which we must openly discuss, since they widely affect us all.
Which brings me to the thought: If one of the most intelligent and open minded online communities can exhibit censorship or can determine users to self-censor, then what can be said about other communities/platforms ?
But what's far worse is that the moderation of Hacker News functions with very little transparency. Even just Googling for the moderator `dang` turns up a lot of angry rants on other blogs and in other sections of the internet, full of people who feel wronged by black-box and one-sided moderation.
It can be quite psychologically upsetting to post a comment, fall victim to group-think downvoting, try to add clarity or try to defend yourself against unreasonable comments, and then find yourself on the non-negotiable end of a black-box moderation action.
If it was just meaningless karma downvotes, few would care. It's the actually hurtful responses and, there's no other way to put it, mean-spirited moderation activity that give pause.
And I'm speaking as someone with a lot of anti-authoritarian tendencies. I'm not shy at all about speaking my mind and I struggle with finding a way to feign respect for authority apparatuses that are not legitimate, like HN moderation. If I feel this apprehension and backlash, I can only imagine that more timid readers feel it to a much more damaging degree.
(Of course, this is just my opinion. I have no idea if it's true.)
One recent example was a useless conversation about whether the US was a democracy or a republic, with 10 different people saying the same thing. Those 10 comments with replies fill several scrolling pages, so the real topic of conversation is buried.
In fact, I think it would be a good thing if it was made impossible for moderators to detach comments that receive enough up-votes, or have child comments (especially comments that disagree) with many up-votes.
In those cases, it's clear that community members get value from the comment, which should infinitely override bespoke opinions of whether it's "on topic enough" to remain -- those subjective opinions ought to count for way less than simply observing whether there are up votes or replies.
Your comment that it "derail[s] a thread" makes the implicit assumption that the comments are actually off-topic. If they are on-topic, but you happen to have the opinion that they aren't (even thought they are) then it's not derailing anything, it's just a healthy reflection of the comment-generating process that is "the pool of all HN readers." I think of it like the John Lennon quote: "Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted."
I don't have a magic answer for how to accurately detect off-topic diversions in a way that satisfied most people most of the time. All I'm saying is that upon seeing a healthy back and forth, it should give me a lot of pause that if I merely think it's off topic, I am probably wrong, and it's just an opinion that should not be indulged by moderator activity.
There was another example of derailment recently, with a dozen comments arguing over what a "middleman" is when the original comment was really about how best to support indie makers.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting discussion, and I hope I haven't made this thread less useful for someone else in the process.
Further, if there are enough replies in a given thread such that your down votes on all of them were enough to lead to a ban, it strongly suggests that the thread really was on-topic, that it generated valuable interest and discussion, and that actually it's just a controversial thread (one you may not like perhaps), but clearly not off topic.
I do see this a lot on HN. When a thread is controversial in a way that HN group-think disapproves of, then "off topic" is used as an inappropriate excuse to down vote it, try to derail any discussion about it, etc.
For example, I think effectively all of the stuff from the subreddit TheRedPill is utter nonsense, and it's often very controversial and I dislike it when some of it appears here at HN.
But it's rarely actually off topic when it's brought up, and it generates actual community interest (usually from people who rightfully point out how problematic and baseless it is).
I'd rather that controversial topics and tangents, even when they are things I don't like, are permitted when they clearly generate community engagement, than to basically have some implicit HN blacklist of disallowed topics that are facetiously treated as off-topic as a way to simply exclude unapproved opinions.
(I'm preemptively sorry if I end up delving into the realm of armchair psychology here)
Is it possible that, if you know you tend to look for authoritarian themes in the artifacts you interact with, that maybe part of your perception is the result of false positives magnified by the emotional impact of the administrative action?
There's always some subjective elements to imposing community rules as a moderator -- that's common in every community, ever. What would be less expected is malice in those actions.
I also don't think that bad moderator actions are common either. Most users probably don't even notice it. It's arguable that this makes it even worse, since it's harder to get the community to care about healthy community-approved policies if they are only protecting a handful of people who are sometimes outside of the HN group-think.
Post away. Sometimes, I have been known to rethink my position (not a bad thing) when I get downvotes. Sometimes I even change my mind when good arguments surface. I learn this way.
The problem is that when they get downvoted they don't produce any response, and if nobody is going to do anything based on what you write, why write it at all? You might as well start yelling at the walls.
Aren't there effects of downvotes like rate limiting and post position?
It accumulated quite a number of up votes as well.
Like, "I got shadow-banned for this comment about memory management in iOS" "... you sure it wasn't for this comment from a few hours earlier about how people who vote for the other political party are [long list of expletives]?"
I'll see if I can get the account details because it's renewed my interest.
I've made a few downvoted comments. One was flagged and removed, and drew a rebuke from dang (on the Slashdot sale story, as it happens), and though my initial comment was perhaps to telegraphically negative, there was substance there.
Also: while it does little good to complain about downvotes as the OP, I've occasionally noted comments in which the downvote brigade strikes me as emotional and/or hivemindish. I'll also frequently drop to the bottom of long threads and upvote comments I feel are getting undue negation even where I disagree with the contents.
This last: so long as the sentiments seem grounded in facts and reason, I don't believe any comment should be greyed.
As for moderation in general, it's a Hard Problem. HN is coasting largely on a community that has good, though far from perfect tendencies. I've seen far too many discussion systems be overwhelmed by the combination of toxic social dynamics and poorly conceived moderation systems. HN suffers only one of those handicaps, for now.
More on moderation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...
Sometimes I might recognize legitimate reasons for getting down voted, in this case I clarify or review my opinion
But sometimes I just keep the comment there, because that's my opinion and hopefully some other person shares it as well even if it costs some down votes
But there's no reason to spend time on a comment if you know it will get downvotes and subsequently ignored. It's like yelling into a brick wall.
At one point he wholesale deleted a comment of mine because it was widely misinterpreted in a sexist way (I clarified to multiple people, but it wasn't enough apparently). The sad part is the only ones being sexist were the ones interpreting it that way, I was personally shocked that so many people thought I was being sexist.
And that was just the last time he stepped in, he had been threatening me repeatedly, and why? My best guess is either
a) because I was having a conversation with another poster in which he came in and bitched at them, only I defended that poster, or b) after I was "flag bombed" (I think that's the term?) for having an opinion many didn't like [1].
I'm not sure which because they were both a part of the same thread, but immediately after I started seeing deng everywhere, threatening me repeatedly. I've been online long enough to know what being targetted by a mod looks like.
This idea that you shouldn't be self censoring on HN is naive. It means you haven't attracted deng's ire (or one of the other mods) or said something that was truly an "unsafe" minority opinion.
There's apparently another person who won't allow linking from HN I believe? I don't know the full story behind that, but I can absolutely understand that person's opinion of HN.
HN is honestly one of the oppressive environments for actual discourse I've seen and that's not a joke. The only site I can think of off the top of my head that's unequivocally worse is hubski.com.
The poster who spoke about 4chan is spot on. You can optimize for good discussion or you can optimize for feel good politeness, but you can't optimize for both. Most communities attempt to balance it, but HN leans far to the side of feel good politeness. You don't actually come to HN for discussion, you come to HN to make comments on random things that pop up. Unfortunately, some mistake that for discussion, but I'm of the opinion those folks don't actually understand what a good discussion is.
To end this post, I'm just going to say I find your opinion to be horrifically naive. Even now I know the reaction is going to be folks piling on to tell me how great a person deng is, and I'll find myself taking another multi-month long hiatus from HN until deng (once again) forgets about me.
I've been online for entirely too long.
[1] The poster I defended took issue with my opinion and we were going round and round about it and deng apparently thought he was getting too heated. I was the recipient of said "heat" and I disagreed.
I never care if people vote me down. I have been downvoted often. It's just a convenient way to censor unwelcome messages.
If people don't want to listen to you even when you have good arguments then the downvoters aren't worth your opinion. Their response however points out if they have something important to say which could question your point of view so that you can use it to advance your own view.
Please don't, it is just karma.
> Which brings me to the thought: If one of the most intelligent and open minded online communities can exhibit censorship or can determine users to self-censor, then what can be said about other communities/platforms ?
I think its an example of a problem that is difficult to solve because you want to surface the content that makes the majority happy which becomes naturally self reinforcing.
That said, I'd like to see a platform that surfaces heavily downvoted content that received some upvotes as a hybrid with purely upvoted content. [e.g. +70, -100 is a comment probably worth ranking at +35 because the downvote/upvote split is likely opinion-based rather than purely factual]
If you take HN seriously enough to care, ummm, why?
No offense but this place largely acts like a more technically sophisticated Reddit with everything from downvoting factual statements to upvoting provably false opinion. That doesn't include the inherent bias in the design towards YC companies and so forth.
I do agree about your comparison to Reddit. Honestly, if my workplace didn't block Reddit, I probably wouldn't spend much time here.
This account got over 300 karma in 20 days. ~60-90 days is how long it usually takes me to hit 1000+.
On and off since 2010.
If you want, I could probably give you one of my 1000+ accounts. I'm not sure if that is against the guidelines tho. I suppose I could email dang. xD
My HN account provides me with no financial benefits and exists purely for entertainment value.
It is "just karma". Without karma, you can't negatively effect other people's karma, which is also just karma. This is the default state everyone started in. Moreover, you can still suppress opinions while having low karma - simply upvote everything else.
I'm of the opinion that the style of disagreement matters a lot more than the opinion itself, for karma impact. I have seen - in another community, granted - serious arguments in favor of cannibalism gain more upvotes than down, because it was done in a well reasoned and constructive manner.
As for communities where this isn't the case? Well, I'm interested in proper conversation and dialog on topics. One that prefers unity of thought, instead, is an echo chamber of parrots I want no part in - voting/karma system or not. I have left communities over smaller issues, and lived a happier life for it. In that case, it's not even "just karma" - it's "just karma in a community I've left."
> Even worse, if the mods disagree strongly with your post, they'll happily detach it (so no one else can see it) and threaten to ban you.
That can happen regardless of your karma - speaking from the perspective of a 'karma' 1%er in another community who's eaten temp-bans.
IMO there shouldn't be a down vote button at all, and to be honest I can't see its purpose. If a comment is trolling or being aggressive then you should flag it, so where is there room for the down vote button?
It becomes quite intuitive to just use it for what you consider an "invalid opinion" regardless of how much you try to teach people otherwise, because it's so convenient to use and people are less rational when they are angered.
It is NOT supposed to be used for incorrect messages! (Or at least, if the message is grey, don't keep downvoting it just because there is a mistake in it. One downvote is enough.) And most especially it is not for disagreeing with someone - that's what the reply button is for.
Too many people come here from reddit with the mentality that downvote is for disagreement.
So I think the issue is somewhat bigger than reddit or HN or even just a certain slice of users. It seems to be a fundamental problem in understanding up/down votes. Maybe psychologically we're inclined to downvote when we disagree, whether consciously or not.
I am also guilty of this even though I know better. It's hard to resist downvoting something I disagree with. It's like a natural response I have to actively work against.
Edits: grammar / clarifying wording
A solution could be to move it to next to the flag button, maybe? And also making it a bit more difficult to do, like requiring the user to input a reason.
I also agree that people should probably not downvote to disagree.
But also, when other people see a grey comment and they think it's unfairly downvoted they should supply a corrective upvote. I know some people on HN do this, but I get the impression that not enough people do.
Maybe merging them isn't the best idea, but changing it to mimic the flag button (i.e. moving it and requiring a reason to be specified before submission) would probably fix this issue, I'd wager.
I'm not so sure about that.
I came from Reddit too, however I've been here for months now, and I still can't downvote anyone. From what I'm told, you need a karma of 1000 to get that ability. I can only upvote.
So, you have to be a longtime HNer to even have this ability to silence other peoples' opinions. You cannot be some newbie here and downvote people, unless you hit the karma jackpot by making a few posts that get hundreds and hundreds of upvotes.
Therefore, I think it's much more likely that what you're seeing (dissenting opinions being downvoted) is coming from both the heavy-handed non-transparent moderators, and from others in their "inner circle" of longtime members.
???
There is no such group on HN. Where are you getting this idea? (Look at my karma score and date joined - if there was such a group I'd know about it by now.)
And on top of that there are tons of users who can downvote, you don't have to be part of some mythical inner circle.
So maybe something like that could work on Hacker News. Slashdot had it, XenForo forums have used for a plugin for it for years and Facebook has just introduced something akin to it in Reactions.
The problem is not that people self-segregate into (multiple) communities where there is a common creed as to what ideas are worthy of discussion; the problem is when there is a suffocating universal consensus where there are ideas that have no home. There is no (useful) better, more open-minded community; there are just places where you can say things you shouldn't say on HN and vice versa.
There's nothing wrong with circlej-rks as long as every jerk has a circle.
Wear them as a badge of honor, that you speak your mind.
I don't know if high intelligence within a group bodes well for freedom of ideas. Intelligence itself is a form of censorship.
The discussions of Brendan Eich's appointment and resignation contain lots of examples.
It's the lurkers who only give input when it's compelling and thought out that I want to hear from, vs jerks like me that spout their opinion on everything.
There is absolutely no social cost for downvoting without commenting.
Adding costs and accountability:
- force comment box on downvotes
- deduct from karma
- flagging only
I can not think of a more critical time for the "STEM" crowd to have a viable forum of discussion.
Topics ranging from the expected behavior of tall steel structures subject to excessive heat (ahem), to digital rights, cryto, crypto-currency, voting systems, genetics, AI, ..., can all benefit from informed discussion and debate.
HN membership, considering the depth and range observed, is entirely capable of this.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learn... -- remember this one, HN?
My own personal guideline: upvote = "I would like more comments like this" and downvote = "I would like less comments like this". My reason for wanting less comments of a particular type can be a lot of things -- incivility, factual incorrectness, being off-topic or distracting, being technically correct but misleading, or even being repetitive in relation to prior comments that already made the same point better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683
Here's pg trying to address incorrect downvoting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057338
I think pg is wrong in this next comment, I think people vote to disagree, and I think there's a pile-on effect. But I don't have the data, and he (and dang) did (and do). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716
EDIT: Some of those threads talk about the "meanness" of HN. I know I'm sometimes dumb and sometimes mean, so please if you see me doing that downvote me, flag me, send me an email.
It's clear that some people are using downvotes aggressively, and that needs managed. I actually had a period of time when every comment I posted (no matter what time of day or what topic) received exactly one downvote between 5 and 6 pm in my time zone, as if I'd offended someone and they were retaliating. But I've also seen people post comments that are purely inflammatory with no worthwhile content (along the lines of "[group] is evil", where [group] is mainstream -- not ISIS or Nazis, but like, Republicans or Muslims) that didn't get downvoted. So the issue is more than "too few downvotes" or "too many downvotes".
So I try to be part of HN's corrective mechanism. If I see something blatantly inappropriate, I downvote and flag if appropriate. If I see something reasonable that's grayed out, I upvote. If I see something non-gray that I think is of negative value, I downvote, and I hope that if I misjudged it someone else will come along and cancel out my vote.
> Downvoting for disagreement is not always bad, but it sometimes is. There should be some nuance here. Don't be indiscriminate. When a comment is blatantly false, downvoting is probably ok, especially when there's something else wrong with the comment. But high-quality, polite posts don't deserve penalizing just because you don't share their position. When you see one of those in negative territory, please be a good citizen and upvote it back to par. Users doing that is one of the community's self-correcting mechanisms, and it's more important now that we've made some downvotes more powerful.
(Emphasis mine)
For what it's worth, I agree that this should be in the site rules.
Forcing the comment box is also interesting. Maybe only make the downvote available to people who have already replied to a post.
If you penalise users for doing that, they'll do less of it, which will make the ranking/filtering less effective.
Like any major site, I would guess the majority of HN readers do not comment, or only comment rarely.
Losing karma for upvoting means you need to comment if you want to upvote, and I suspect many readers will simply choose not to participate in either activity rather than try to maintain a positive karma balance.
Each upvote on a submission: +100 for submitter, -1 for voter.
Each upvote on a comment: +10 for commenter, -1 for voter.
Each downvote on a comment: -10 for commenter, -1 for voter
It's rather the opposite. There are tens of thousands of potential voters, a fraction of that in comments and a fraction of that in quality link submitters (once you filter out the spam). Anyway, regardless of the situation there is an easy way out of this: measure and adjust accordingly, I'm sure 'arc' has the ability to define named constants.
This would also answer the question 'what is karma good for?' once and for all.
Just a stray thought.
Why should they care about balanced conversation? What if those balanced conversations somehow promote criticism of companies that they are involved with?
More logically, Ycomb gets a lot of prestige and "free" marketing from the quality and popularity of HN. It's in their interests to maintain and improve that quality. Besides, they're hardly going to lose clients because a couple of negative comments don't get downvoted into oblivion as swiftly as before.
It's not perfect but it puts every other fairly large public internet forum I've seen to shame.
Not everything has to be done for economic gain. If you want to pretend it's all a ruse to make more money then you are free to consider having such a robust discussion forum to be good PR for Y Combinator; it garners an enormous amount of goodwill and respect in the tech community.
And they do care about earnest thoughtful balanced conversation. There are plenty of posts critical of YC companies or PG or you name it that are not censored. Mods interact with the community regularly to enforce standards and curate post quality.
Imagine if we take the downvote ability away from everyone. I believe there is still an "implicit" downvote in the form of every other comment getting upvoted. Under the current system, upvoted posts will be pushed to the top and downvoted posts will be on the bottom. Would this not cause the same effect as previous? Being ignored several times because your opinion does not conform the social norm will cause you to self sensor (or leave HN), would it not?
At the same time I think we recognize the value of upvotes, which in theory should allow for relevant and thoughtful content to be pushed to the top so more people can be exposed to it. Otherwise we'd have the traditional forums, which has widely variable SNR.
I'm not sure how to reconcile these points:
1. The wish to filter for "good" post and filter out the "bad" posts.
2. The subjective definition of "good" or "bad".
3. "Bad" (opposite) opinions gets buried because of point 2.
On the other hand I think education does work, as personally I refrain from downvoting when i disagree, only when it clearly does not add value (but even then, that is subjective). Although I'm not sure if this is obvious enough to HN users who first gained the ability to downvote.
Maybe we need more nuanced voting options? While this could get a bit complex, such a system may function better. People could upvote a post as it is well written/thought out and/or is provocative/clever/interesting, but downvote it as they disagree. The overall comment karma would balance out, rather than it just being downvoted as lots of people disagreed with it.
Facebook is now using a similar type of system with their multiple emotes. I think such a system would work well with the HN community. It may lead to more thought out comments, as simple opinions can be expressed more accurately via the voting system.
It will still have the problem that child comments of a downvoted comment will not get as much exposure. It also means that even if the comment was just unpopular (despite being well thought out) it will be downvoted after the first person posts a comment disagreeing.
Another approach could be to factor child karma when ranking comments. Though this gets significantly more complex as there are many edge cases where this will not work as intended.
I'd encourage you to try and not feel bad about the situation. It's not your job to provide insight or knowledge to others, or even just plain old participation. If you don't like the response you get, just keep doing what you're doing: don't post. It's their loss.
P.s. If this comment gets down-voted, which my filters tell me is "highly likely", I'll just leave this P.s. comment instead of doing a full delete like I usually do. Hopefully you'll have read it by then. :)
I have been kicked out of online communities for not aligning with the groupthink, but I tend to see that as a positive for me in the long run. If I'm so disliked by a community then I'm not going to force it. I one angered a guy so much he made up some random bullshit about me being a pedo and the mods bought it hook line and sinker. I decided that any place where the mods will ban you and never even respond to or probably even read your appeals is not worth the effort. That said, I don't go looking for fights. I'm not going to register a StormFront account anytime soon because everything I might say on there would just cause arguments and strife.
Be an adult and stand by your opinions. Other people may disagree, but that's life. Sometimes you may even be wrong and change your mind later, but that's also life. The situation may also change and invalidate your old opinion. Most importantly don't be a dick.
On Reddit, for example, it really doesn't matter if you get a few downvotes. Your post is still visible, and you still have the ability to up or downvote anyone else. You are not a lesser member of the community on that site when you get some downvotes.
On here, you are. The system is explicitly designed to make it an echo chamber. If you have low karma, you can't downvote people, you can't post very much, and there are probably other more subtle ways they punish you for having low karma.
So it's absolutely to your advantage, if you want to be a member of this "community" and actually have your posts seen and commented on so you can participate in useful and interesting discussion, to self-censor.
This is a good thing. It makes it difficult to create a downvote-bot-brigade. It means that only people who have participated in building the community up to a certain degree have the right to act as gatekeepers.
> "you can't post very much"
I'm not aware of any such restriction, except for very-very new accounts.
> "it's absolutely to your advantage ... to self-censor"
In a sense, this is by design. If downvotes don't help people learn what sort of comment is and isn't welcome here, then we'd be overrun with cat pictures. Downvotes are supposed to teach you "this doesn't belong" just like upvotes are supposed to teach you "this is an appreciated comment".
I think it's even OK that occasionally a decent comment will pick up a couple of downvotes because it's slightly disagreeable, poorly written, or just that someone clicked the wrong button on accident -- a few random points of negative won't hurt someone whose contributions are generally positive.
Where it becomes a problem is when well-thought-out, civil, reasonable comments get heavily downvoted. When someone with a contrary opinion can't make any positive progress. I try to make it a point to toss upvotes on comments like that, but perhaps more could be done.
One thought: even if we don't require a comment box for all downvotes, perhaps requiring a comment box for downvoting something beyond a certain level of negative (like, beyond -1) would keep people from piling on mindlessly or needlessly.
I really don't get it. You reward a person whose opinion you disagree with, punish yourself (in a very minor way) and take away any chance that other people will click the other button.
I delete comments that are deemed "not worth reading" because it's low cost to do so and improves the overall comment quality, at least for some people.
The simple fact is that mildly negative comments are worth much less than mildly positive comments, so it's almost always a good idea to err on the side of removing negative comments. The potential bad, in this case, far outweighs the potential good.
That's a problem that's on you to solve, not the HN community. You should stand by your comments instead of just deleting them, and you shouldn't take downvotes as an indication that you should post less.
You're missing out. I regularly have posts that go to -2, -3, etc., which are then upvoted back into positive territory. Here's a fairly recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11332081 (I think that one got downvoted initially for the explicit religious imagery.)
The little mental boost I get from an occasional 'yo-yo' completely counteracts the 0 and -1 votes I get all the time. But mostly, I don't care about internet points. The point is to learn and share.
Which isn't to say that I don't occasionally delete a post, or wish that I had. Another word for "self-censorship" is "judgment".
Yet again, an online community is obviously not a nation-state: one has chosen voluntarily and consciously to participate in it, and could always decide to leave and go elsewhere.
Those people are gone now. They're not on SoylentNews, and there's sure as hell not on here. I don't think they're on Reddit either. They're not anywhere.
My guess: they've retired from tech after getting tired of all the BS and nasty personalities, and done something entirely different with their lives. Maybe they took their savings and moved to Costa Rica and opened a restaurant on the beach.
Anyway, we also lose a great deal of spammers, trolls and just disturbing people. That's the other side of the coin.
Slashdot incurs a large cost (noise) in allowing anon comments - depending on who you ask, the moderation system either barely keeps that in check, or is completely insufficient.
Climate researchers are also self censoring, but for slightly different reasons. Given the stakes, its also an interesting case study.
"In several important respects the modelling community is self-censoring its research to conform to the dominant political and economic paradigm"
http://www.fdsd.org/what-we-are-reading/duality-in-climate-s...
I've been around for many years here on HN. I tend to change my password to something random from time to time, so I don't get too attached to my karma, burning man style. It helps.
I don't think there's a fixed HN style for comments. Some people like flash comments and replies, some people enjoy longer, more thoughtful conversations. I guess it depends on the article/subject.
I tend to be a slow thinker and a slow writer and apart from their length, I also spend a lot of time writing them.
But once again, thanks for taking the time and maybe next time I'll remember to keep it shorter and to the point :).
Maybe HN should have an 'anonymous' feature for accounts above a certain karma that allows a post to be made with no username attached, and no effect on karma. Behind the scenes, admins can still issue bans for unacceptable comments but the opinion gets protected from the groupthink.
Of course, that means added work for the mods, or a new class of moderators altogether.
We must never lose our ability to remain anonymous when necessary.
Can you show me some examples? I tried browsing 4chan, but the site's navigation trips me up badly.
Yes, some very smart people go there and some very intelligent discussions occur sometimes.
I wish you luck!
Then there is the crazy things that /b/ will do with a photo. There was a principal who was goading the group with a photo of two underage girls, the tenacious Anonymous was able to run down the school and principal.
It is scary and soothing at the same time.
Quote from the current owner of 4chan: "All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work."
To motivate myself to finish the comment I know won't be taken well in the average I first remind myself that the point of my comment isn't to cater to the consensus of the majority of the HN crowd but the reason I started writing it was because I felt something needed to be said and if there is one other person who finds my comment valuable, I have succeeded regardless of everything else. Secondly, in entering the game of negative karma I expect downvotes with the idea that the more I get the more sure I am I did strike the right chord there. It doesn't always work and I get a wave of upvotes instead, but you get the idea. I rarely look back except when my karma changes a lot overnight which is when I might take a look at what happened.
Note that I don't, or at least I don't intend to, troll, insult, or talk off-topic in order to hog downvotes for my game. The downvotes themselves aren't the goal: I just consider them an indicator of success when writing a comment I'm pretty sure I won't be getting many upvotes either. It's like targetting controversy. Ideally, I aim to make remarks that question the status quo or find blind spots in collective assumptions.
To close, I'm thinking about your question in the end. I think that self-censorship is about the need to belong. If you're an independent individualist you have no need for self-censorship because you don't care if people were to oust you because of what you said. Yet humans need that feeling of belonging which I think is best reserved for people closest in your life. You can shrug off a lot of thoughts when it comes to your spouse, your kids, or good friends -- thoughts that you could defend and question till the end in principle, but because principles are merely mental tools you know you can afford to shrug off a few of them as between you and these people you (hopefully) have something that goes beyond mere mental gymnastics.
Curiously, the original message sparked a lot of commentary and it seems like lots of people here are feeling the pain of "unjust" moderation sometimes.
Sometimes I also play the "fuck it, let them mod me down, I'll just say it" game - I expect to be buried and that's fine -(although people tend to heavily up vote maverick comments).
But sometimes modding takes me by complete surprise - "Wtf, why did I they mod me down?"..
For some reason, I tend to internalize negative feedback from random strangers a lot more than I internalize the positive feedback.. And I feel like I'm not the only one doing this, which is a bit of a relief :).
But my original comment wasn't necessarily a complaint about the status quo here on HN - some hiccups aside, it's still the most civilized and wise forum online..
What worries me is that we still haven't figured the public forum thing out and some versions of it are plain dangerous (eg. forums on certain news websites tend to degenerate into racism, hatred, bigotry, etc).
The up/down vote paradigm seems to have reached it's peak, we need a new way to collectively filter thoughts.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...
HN needs more logging to detect such coordinated (down-)voting rings to avoid group thinking and opinion shaping orchestrated by bad players.
Hi there from my 2nd account! I have also abandoned about 1K points of karma, because I thought I should censor myself less and care less about it.
Surprisingly, I didn't get downvoted as much as I expected. Lot of comments I make and consider really silly get high karma, and yet other my comments which I consider to be a really good points are sitting there with 1. The moderation system seems quite random.
I think the big problem of modern moderation systems is the fleeting nature of all those discussions. Having a persistent discussion about a topic is difficult. I think something like Wiki or Stackoverflow works, but only to an extent.