Opinion vs. Skill on Hacker News
richardwatson.co
richardwatson.co
For most of these comments, it just comes down to "why are you right? What's your experience?" There's so many armchair speculators that get upvoted. If I can't go through your post history or look at your cred, why should I trust you to be correct about complicated topics that I might not understand? Do you even write code? Humans judge this stuff based on accomplishments and reputation in real life so why not on the internet?
I only realized this after coming across these kinds of comments about fields I specialize in or have a lot of experience with, and seeing blatantly wrong comments being upvoted and affirmed by other comments. If it's like this for exporting I have experience with, it's probably the same for stuff I don't know. Upvotes and affirmed comments should not be taken as truth.
And in the end opinion doesn't really matter unless you have influence in a community. Otherwise nobody that matters will really listen. Write a longform blog or something more captivating rather than some sneaky comment on HN that people will forget about after a week. Same goes for this comment I guess ;)
It's a discussion, you're supposed to evaluate the other's arguments and exchange ideas, knowledge and opinions about the subject, not a lecture where you're supposed to trust the other to educate you.
That said I very much appreciate the genuine experts who post here, and hate seeing them driven away by disrespectful people.
HN walks the line between experience and openness better than any other community I know of. It's not perfect but it's still amazing.
Sometimes you don't have any personal experience and then the best thing you can do is post a link to something interesting you read.
If you do have some personal experience, you can tell a story based on it.
Unidan had credibility when it came to biology and ecology. When he commented on matters within his domain of expertise, he got all the upvotes. It was great having someone like that around. When there was a topic/thread/question about biology that one needed a credible answer to, all one had to do was summon Unidan typing his name.
It's a great pity he broke the rules and was banned.
> Very often, useful comments are crowded out by one-uppy point scorers and the top half of a reasonable thread can be filled by long side-discussions that can’t be scrolled past fast enough. Vitriol abounds.
Compared to other discussion boards, I usually find HN threads are far more thoughtful and less antagonistic.
I mean, from the author's own example, compare the Brexit threads on HN[1] and Reddit[2]. The top comment on the HN thread is a thoughtful comment on why the EU is important and what the EU should aspire to be - whether you agree with the author or not, it's not overly charitable to say the author wasn't simply making a "one-uppy point scorer". The top comment on the Reddit thread is a joke about making a bet on Brexit.
There absolutely are HN threads full of vitriol and "one-uppy point scorers", but they're more rare - compared to, again, other parts of the internet. And yes, there are other online discussion boards that are even more thoughtful. Still, I don't think the characterization is entirely fair.
I guess my point is that the opinion threads can also often be very illuminative. The top thread on that HN Brexit post is actually a pretty interesting discussion about 18th century revolutions. Perhaps a bit basic to someone well-versed in modern western history, and certainly needs to be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism, but still interesting nonetheless.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11966167
2: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4pkt3k/bbc_forec...
That's quite the mischaracterization. Some of us happen to have research background and know very well how the phd daily grind goes. It's due to our personal experience and first-hand accounts of the whole academia/phd life and hardship that we do have and present negative opinion on the whole industry.
Just because opinions don't cast academia in a good light it doesn't mean they aren't accurate accounts of what academia life actually is.
Of course there might be a lot of things to improve, but I think it's unfair to criticise HN when it's doing much better than many other sites. Well, maybe the article doesn't even get to that, but I have this feeling of misplaced blame. The real problem lies in society, not in the website. There's no shortcut to education...
https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/4pkw1n/britain...
You realize this is because HN shadowbans people whose opinions don't fit the crowd, right?
e.g. Any post about removing "master/slave" terminology.
Politics is a great example. Politics threads are typically uninformed. However, it's not that there are no facts involved, it's that people who don't know the facts won't let that stop them from aggressively commenting.[0] Of course, by facts, I don't mean things like "Democrats/Republicans are evil", but basic facts about what laws have been passed, how the supreme court works, etc.
This isn't a distinction that's about the topics, it's a distinction about people's attitude towards those topics. After all, questions about Java's GCs compared to Go's GC, or Android vs. iOS security are equally grounded in facts, but attract almost as much uninformed commentary.
[0] I don't want to be an elitist. There's plenty of good ways to comment on a subject you don't know about, to ask good questions, etc. It's the certainty of the uninformed that's a problem.
1. They're about topics you can't prove right/wrong with science (at least not for the most part), so there's never a consensus.
2. They're linked to their participants identities, meaning they're very uninterested in changing their opinion or listening to others they disagree with (since it comes across as a personal attack on their background).
3. People don't know if they're experts at these topics, but don't care and will argue about them anyway.
4. They're things everyone has an opinion about, informed or otherwise.
5. It's virtually impossible to tell who's an expert and who just likes to talk a lot, meaning discussions are filled with every kind of crank and extremist possible.
6. For the very few who actually are open to new ideas and perspectives, they're often easier swayed by emotional appeals than facts when discussing these topics.
Hence the raging flame war that will inevitably ensue when one of these topics is discussed in almost any forum (internet or otherwise).
I suspect there's an availability bias. Consider a table:
| | Has Identity | No Identity |
|----------------+--------------+-------------|
| Thoughtful | Insightful | Insightful |
| Not Thoughtful | Obnoxious | Silent |
Flat Earthers are an interesting example in this case. There wasn't an identity attached to it, it doesn't support some political or religious cause (maybe it's not become an identity, but it didn't start as one). It's just catnip for people who think they're skeptical and free-thinkers, but are actually just bad at reasoning.
This is a pretty good metric for finding high quality threads (isn’t a low ratio something the HN algorithm uses in weighting front page rank?). The only problem is that sometimes a great comment will, understandably, generate a lot of responses.
I wish there were a variant of the /bestcomments endpoint [0] that surfaced highly-voted comments within the last 12 hours. Not that days-old threads aren’t worthwhile to read, it’s just that they no longer have active participation.
I completely disagree with this article. It sounds really elitist. Opinions are how we understand the world and the changing situations, complexities and nuances. They (may) help us refine our views and develop newer and/or better mental models that we can relate to and use elsewhere.
To state that topics/threads high on opinions are essentially worthless is a generalization taken too far.
That's not snark. There's nothing wrong with writing something like this. But use of HN is not a scientific thesis and there are experts in the field of HN participation.
Cool if people want to use it as a jumping off point for talking about stuff, but ironic nonetheless.
There's no rule - some post daily and that's great for them. They also often drive the discussions and the "feel". Awesome, it's their watercooler. But there's another way to maximise enjoyment of HN, and my post is for those who might benefit from better signal/noise.
I still miss PG.
On a different forum, the lead moderator retired, but then stuck around and de facto retained a small unpaid staff role. I think it has had a poisonous effect on the site.
It would be wonderful if pg could continue participation as just a member without it going weird and problematic places. But I don't think that's very realistic and I feel he did the right thing for the health of the forum.
Though I certainly understand why some people miss him.
A lot of opinions aren’t bought by experience though. Opinions on the best x, are largely useless in my eyes, and easy to come by. You’ll see it in almost any HN discussion on a specific tech these days. I mean, when is the last time you saw a HN thread about JavaScript where half of it wasn’t a debate on why JS is good/shit and how WASM is the next Jesus?
I wouldn’t call all of those opinions undervalued, because they have no real use and serve no purpose. X is typically terrible and unproductive, but it’s also lovable and very productive. With almost everything there are pros and cons, and the only truly valuable opinions on anything are from people who make it work or crashed trying and then succeeded by doing something else.
I think this world needs a whole lot of “talk is cheap, show me the code”, but once someone actually does the work, I think we should learn from their experience. I think HN has been great at sharing the useful opinions, at least so far.
This was a semi-useless opinion by the way.
A kind of opinions from people who are far from being established experts in a particular area are called "a fresh look" and may occasionally happen to be useful too as well as opinions of people who are more of generalists and theorists than specialists and practics. Opinions from skilled experts may occasionally happen to be a way too biased.
> Opinions on the best x are largely useless... half of it wasn’t a debate on why JS is good/shit and how WASM is the next Jesus?
If they uncover a lot about why and do it concisely I would not consider them useless.
That's my opinion :-)
The use of three words to hedge the usefulness aspect, somewhat contradicts the original assertion of opinions being undervalued.
I happen to agree that a fresh look, in the form of an opinion from a non-expert, can be extremely valuable, especially since I'm acutely aware that I'm certain to be biased on any topic where I have expertise from experience. However, that value seems to be proportional to how well-informed it is.
That is, if the opinion is based on insufficient knowledge (that can be obtained other than by experience, such as with a Web search), it can easily result in a subtle form of talking past each other that doesn't reveal itself until after a long back-and-forth. Sadly, that mostly just reveals fundamental gaps in knowledge, rather than any fresh perspective.
Apart from that, people with skills have opinions, and vice versa. There's cross-over, noise, debate, and sparks. If all that causes someone to think about the problem, and get informed before firing back a response, then that's a good thing for discussion and learning.
I would love some filter that just makes the political stories disappear.
But even when I do write sonething technical here, it's only a matter of time until I get "corrected" by some pedantic try-hard trying to score internet points. Half the time they're wrong, half the time they miss the point of what I'm saying or trying to derail the conversation .
About 80% of the time these people have a username that's 'first initial-last name', so maybe they're trying to build some kind of name cred?
Anyways these days, the only time I comment is when I get baited into one of these opinion articles. Hnews is becoming more like Reddit to me.
Edit: why not comment instead of censoring with your down votes.
Well, I've learnt my lesson about explaining downvotes - you just wanted someone to attack.
Most professions, hell most circumstances in life involve judgements. You can have disagreements as to how those judgements are handled, or find the nature of how conflict is handled to be overly contentious or disconnected from seeking resolution or for it to be fought over low stakes, and that's fine I don't disagree with any of that. But judgements are important, politics are important, and frankly I find it disgusting that places like hacker news foster this idea that our profession needs to be disconnected from these things.
However, I find that this "skill" focused quality seems to be degrading over time with lobste.rs. My feeling is that I'm seeing an increasing number of posts moving to the opinion side (politics/culture) and the quality of comments overall seems to be waning a bit too. I'm not saying the these are dramatic shifts, but nonetheless shifting. Perhaps this is inevitable with more and more members. (For the record I do not have a lobste.rs account)
I do agree with the parent article here... most of HN is a wasteland of "opinion" stories and comments (much like my comment here). I'm guilty of contributing to this, too... I do my best to not get baited, but sometimes emotion overcomes my reason. However, when there are "skill" oriented stories, the comments here on HN tend to have some outstanding entries, the quality of which I don't see as frequently on lobste.rs. lobste.rs is generally good, but doesn't achieve great as frequently.
The challenge of HN is sorting through all the crap... I don't use the HN front page. So far http://hn.elijames.org/ this has been helpful at the story level.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17517643
You can't read it but I screenshotted it for you. Dang calls me a troll simply for asking him to clarify and tells me to leave the site. "Legalistic Gambit of the troll," as if I'm trying to win some game. All I want is to be treated fairly on this site. It was very hurtful.
The comments can be seen by logged-in users who have 'show dead' turned on. But we started at 'moderators censor comments'. Which they generally don't and haven't in your case. That's all.
You are entitled to your opinions, but you do not get to unilaterally determine what others do or do not find offensive. That's not how the universe works.
There are ways to make similar points without it being flamebait. If you really feel it is important to discuss such things, you could work on improving your framing and diplomacy instead of continuing to complain about the incident two months later in an unrelated discussion.
There's also no intent to insult your social skills. But the reality is there are only two reasonable ways to interpret your behavior here:
1. Either you legitimately are failing to understand. (There can be myriad reasons for that. Disability is not the only possible reason.)
2. You actually are a troll.
The first is the more charitable interpretation and the one I am most prone to because I raised two special needs sons. So I default to assuming someone honestly doesn't understand for some reason because I've dealt with that a lot in life.
It sometimes gets me into social hot water when I am sincerely trying to be helpful.
Like now.
Indeed, I was flaming no one
That's not what 'flaimbait' means.
This was something I wrestled with for a long time, in part because I've had a lot of great personal relationships in which hashing everything out and making sure both sides get really heard, etc, is the norm. And it simply doesn't work on a public forum.
Another thing I did for a long time was just reply to everyone who replied to me. I felt that was the polite and respectful thing to do. In meat space, it is unconscionably rude to refuse to reply to someone who has addressed you directly.
But this isn't meat space and in practice it often winds up looking pigheaded, obtuse, fighty and like one is refusing to back down when you do this on the internet, in part due to lack of voice tone, facial expression, etc.
Yes I've admitted that the content of my post may have offended some people. The issue I'm raising is that that shouldn't matter. What matters is if I was using openly rude, disrespectful, or antagonistic behavior. My original comment did none of that and was in good faith and was meant to provide an interesting sociological take on a current event.
I don't want a megaphone or a soap box for the random scientific studies I reference on this forum. I simply do not want to be censored for citing data with which people disagree. If I was intentionally being rude or disrespectful then I would understand the censorship, since that is verbal assault, but that is not the case here. I will not self-censor for the sake of upvotes. I'm a respectful adult who believes in liberalism, free inquiry, and civil discussion, no other conditions need apply. If the HN mods disagree then it can't be honestly claimed that this a forum that stands for free inquiry and civil discussion.
Similarly, the mods must balance the good of the whole against the good of the individual, and they must do so without the benefit of omniscience and omnipotence.
Asking specific individuals who have done X (in this case posting flamebait) to please not do X is one of the tools they have for trying to let individuals speak without it being unduly problematic for the forum as a whole.
Allowing individuals to do X and then trying to get after everyone else for "taking the bait" so to speak is just not a good way to handle things.
I'm fond of the mods. I think they do an uncommonly good job. Granted, I'm possibly biased because I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard, so the way they currently handle things arguably works for me.
I wish you well and I hope you eventually find a way to interact with the forum that satisfies you. I personally think you are completely unnecessarily turning this into a hill to die on and that tends to lead to being banned if you persist long enough. That's just reality. The mods have to call it quits at some point when someone is regularly breaking the rules and refuses to cooperate when they are told the rules apply to them and they are currently breaking them.
But I really need to get on with my life. I have other things to tend to today and I was only foolishly engaging you yesterday because I was under the weather and, at such times, bad habits of mine tend to come to the fore, such as me trying to be kind and helpful to strangers even though there is a very long history of that biting me in the ass bigtime and I really should know better by now.
So you will need to excuse me, but I'm feeling better today and not so inclined to feel like "Fuck this shitty, shitty world and it's asshole rules about not being kind to people because looking out for number one is all that fucking matters." That's a form of temporary insanity I am prone to (that never fails to bite me in the ass when I indulge it) and I'm more rational today.
Ciao.
Opening with an assertion on your part that I am failing to understand is borderline personal attack and disrespects the fact that I am choosing to talk with you and give some of my time and energy to you. Above, you say there is no need to insult your social skills. Now you turn around and insult my intelligence and character.
In other words, you are taking a position that I need to be civil and respectful and work hard to not inadvertently insult you, but you don't have to do the same, for me or generally. Expecting the same of you is framed as censorship and as a moral defect on the part of people who don't agree with you and are expressing that fact, whether with words or downvotes or flags. They aren't allowed to express their disagreement because that's censorship of you in your eyes.
I'm a woman. I'm quite open about that. This is an overwhelmingly male forum. I routinely deal with downvotes and such because I'm a demographic outlier.
I am unwilling to be broken. I am unwilling to be cowed and trained to not give my actual point of view in order to be able to stay. Staying on such terms strikes me as pointless. This disposition has helped get me thrown off of several other forums.
But I've worked hard at trying to figure out how to respect others while expressing myself here. I've worked hard at figuring out better ways to express what I want to say so I'm actually heard and not presumed to be some man-hating feminazi with an axe to grind.
For a long time, it was a hard row to hoe. So I'm very sympathetic to people who are frustrated with trying to participate here and feeling mistreated.
So I occasionally try to talk to folks who are having trouble fitting in to try to say "Hey, I get it, it's frustrating and a sucky experience. But there are things you can do on your end to make this work better."
And that's my reason for engaging you. But now I'm being lumped in with "those people" who are silencing you, never mind that I'm giving you ample opportunity to talk here.
At this point, I'm feeling pretty darn disrespected and like I'm a fool, "as usual", and feeling like only an idiot would reach out to someone under such circumstances and it's no wonder your comments get so many downvotes and flags, because ugh this is feeling like all down side for me. So I will likely be bowing out of the discussion because I'm aggravated and it doesn't look productive to me.
That's not a personal attack.