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Comment by cycloptic | Hacker News Reader

I hope many of us internalized this early. It's not very accurate, but I try to think of this as meaning that on average, everything I post online is being read by a minimum of 99 people, multiplied by either the upvote count on the thread (for HN) or the number of active followers I have (for Twitter). It has helped me to always think this to myself before posting something.

I probably am biased from the culture on these sites but it still seems all to easy for people to still get dragged into fruitless discussions, overly emotional flamewars and trollbait that they will regret later.

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That's why I left Quora. I'm a really gullible person, and I was going to respond to somebody who posted something inflammatory, then I realized I had the option to just walk away. So I did.

I remember something similar about companies too. When you have product market fit, customers will sear you when your product doesn't work. If you don't, you'll never hear from them again.

Tangential, but it's strange to me the sort of culture that Quora has cultivated over the years. It seems to tolerate and even encourage low quality content and contributors to the point that ignorance, misinformation and poorly researched opinionated answers thrive on a regular basis. That's not to say there aren't good contributors and content, but browse any one random topic today and you'll be forgiven for thinking you are on Yahoo Answers. Just no filter at all, extremely poor questions, offtopic comments posted as answers, people with no understanding of the subject shamelessly pretending to know what they are talking about, etc etc.

It's just all around incredibly unpleasant. I loved Quora in its early years when it was invitation only, but I don't ever want to have anything to do with it again.

I browse Quora quite a lot, but I only follow writers I like, and no topics, to avoid exactly this. The average answer quality is dreadful.

I think the point about shamelessly pretending to understand, though, is a subtler question, and difficult to address. I follow people on a lot of topics I don't know about, and I've occasionally discovered later down the line than they're full of crap. And I realise in retrospect that I've helped them do it, upvoting seemingly well-researched answers because I appreciated the effort.

It really highlights the difficulty of figuring out who to trust when there's no central authority, and I could see myself being drawn into some reality-denying group a la flat-earthers or antivaxxers just because I happened to follow the wrong people at the start, and on their advice reject other answers.

Yes but if everybody does that, the only thing that will remain in the history will be unchallenged inflammatory claims.

Which will lead most people passing by to consider that the topic is mostly driven from the point of view of this minority.

This is why we hear a lot about the SJW, anti-vax, the flat earther and so on these days: they make a lot of noise online, even if IRL we never see them because there are so few of them.

This is also why we can see extreme political point of views rising, because people are embolden to join in, reading mass of unchallenged content, pandering to their fear. IRL, they may not, it would not be socially acceptable and the barrier to entry would be bigger.

People generally don't say inflammatory things because they're inherently evil. They're scared, or mad, or have things going on in their life. Arguing online won't change that. Conversely, fixing those things may make trolling less appealing.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/632474-i-have-a-foreboding-...

Good guide to avoiding trolls. Golden rule: "A conversation is not a contest"

https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...

Some very insightful thoughts in that link. I especially liked these two:

"People who provide challenging opinions are not trolling so long as they are not deviating from the conversation at hand. There are some people whose only goal is to attain emotional harmony. When a challenging opinion is encountered it is easy for some people to view this disruption to the social norm as trolling, when it likely isn't."

"Some people are easily offended. When a person engages in a conversation directly without distraction they aren't trolling simply because you became emotional."

That was pretty awesome. Thanks for the link!

You're smart. Apparently 1% of us just can't keep our damn mouths shut.

I didn't smarten up until I did! Still love the HN community :)

If you don’t what?

If you don't have product market fit

Have a product-market fit

> on average, everything I post online is being read by a minimum of 99 people...

There are also big differences within this 1%. Even among the people who write regularly, there is probably a tiny minority that generates most of the text. Imagine people with no life, spending each day at least 10 hours online, typing without thinking too much, which allows them to post at least one comment each minute... doing this for years. Your comments are mostly lost in this ocean.

On Twitter that still seems to be a bad problem but it's less so here. Those types tend to say the same things over and over again and get dismissed or downvoted. Unless there are posters on HN that just happen to be 100x more interesting than everyone else... are there? :)

The Leaders list notes high-karma HN contributors.

There are many notable accounts, from leaders and experts in the community, who don't make that list.

Popularity and prolificity are not measures of quality.

one nice thing on stackoverflow is you can see your "Impact". For instance mine is...

  IMPACT
  ~3.9m
  people reached

looking at their stats, a very small percentage are answering most of the questions.

> is being read by a minimum of 99 people

I think of that sometimes when writing. I try to avoid, for example, abbreviations: It's shorter for me to write, but it means 99 other people will need to decipher them.

Or not editing my post, things like that, that might save me time, but are multiplied by 99 on the other end.

This thinking actually causes me to post more, and get into more flamewars, because it bothers me when something obviously wrong is going to be seen by hundreds of people.

I feel that too. If the bad guys are the only ones talking, they will be pretty convincing.

That's not just a feel, mon ami: that's explicitly the point of online marketing & propaganda. Their methods aren't new at this point and are fairly well documented.

But is all that thinking really worth it? I mean surely you don't want to say too much bullshit, or mislead people... But take this comment; would I really post it if I thought it would waste the time of some hundreds of people reading it?

Also... then there's the problem of feedback, which is how you make progress in a conversation... but I fear I begin to digress.

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Authorship

Writing for online credit, audience, influence, and/or "imaginary internet points" may not be money, but they are all extrinsic motivators in the sense Schopenhauer references.

I wish downvotes had a text field feedback option. I often downvote comments for reasons that may not be obvious to the author. That could be ripe for abusive messages, but still think it's a noteworthy idea.

The old Slashdot moderation system had a variant of this. You could assigns comment score and a reason for that score. It worked pretty well until users inevitably learned how to abuse it.

I don't know the problems there, but would the following avoid the abuse?

Only accept pre-defined labels everyone agreed on + references to existing answers?

Alternatively only allow a refutation format which is simple to validate.

And make it clear that votes are only a show of sentiment since this is not a democracy we are talking about.

Abused in what way? That’s different from any other points moderation system

Just because 99% of people lurk doesn’t mean they will see YOUR contribution. I mean, the popularity of authors or posts is not uniform either.

> I probably am biased from the culture on these sites but it still seems all to easy for people to still get dragged into fruitless discussions, overly emotional flamewars and trollbait that they will regret later.

Life is about emotions and regret. If you don't have any emotions or regrets, you haven't lived. I hope people internalize that as well. Also, my top peeve on social media these days are virtue signaling goody-two-shoes. The paternalistic moralizing and talking down to isn't my cup of tea. If people wanted that, they could go read Aesop's Fables.

A data point: A HN post of mine had ~29K unique viewers* with ~680 upvotes. Ratio comes to 43 unique visitors per upvote.

(* Per Github traffic stats.)

This reminds me of our prof encouraging us to ask anything "because at least five others are wondering the same thing."

Why should we care about what the silent 99% think? We’re the top 1%, everyone else wishes they either had something to say or the courage to say it.

Being in the 1% that contributes does not necessarily mean you're the top 1% by quality of thought.

Such 1%, wow.

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