Hacker News Reader

Comment by vepea2Ch | Hacker News Reader

That's really insightful, thanks for taking the time of sharing it.

That being said, without considering our own opinions on a given topic, you can easily reproduce the experience of visiting random HN threads and finding a well written dismissive post on top of the thread, no matter what the subject is, and almost systematically (and thus, when someone is interested in the topic, that's the first thing they see). This is hardly explained by the "monster neighbors shock" effect. If you agree with this observation, how would you explain it?

View on HN

I'll offer two explanations. First, there's a contrarian dynamic on the internet: people rush in to express whatever they disagree with or dislike about something (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and such comments tend to get upvoted because, for whatever reason, critical/indignant comments get upvoted. This is a weakness of the voting system (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).

Second, though, I think you might be describing your own shock experience here. Not every thread starts with a shallow dismissal—some do, but actually most don't. (Moderation is a factor, because we downweight petty and indignant comments whenever we see them at the top of a thread.) My bet is that you're seeing these sometimes, and because they're shocking and unpleasant, they somehow expand into your experience of HN overall. That's a shock experience, because the things that strike us unpleasantly end up dominating our sense of the whole. I've written about this a lot, but in slightly different terms: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Trying to figure these phenomena out is an ongoing process.

I see. It makes sense, thanks. I guess that's actually the problem that silo'd discussions solve (if you see only what you already like, you won't rush to disagree, and your comments won't shock people). Although, that's quite a depressing conclusion :)

Out of curiosity, do you have any leads on what may replace a voting system for emerging insightful content? It sounds like a job for AI, but I guess any bias in it would be hated even more passionately.

I don't think AI has good enough taste yet. The best possibility I know of is giving users a higher-signal (than upvoting) way to single out a post that they think is particularly good. This would be like flagging, but for good things rather than bad. Actually, that was our intention when we created the 'favorites' feature and made favorites public—but it didn't work out that way, so maybe this is harder than it sounds.

There's a bit more discussion about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157675.

Super interesting, thanks. Have you considered limiting the amount of votes a user can cast per hour or day or week? I guess they would get more on the reflective side if they're dealing with something perceived as a limited resource, making vote itself that higher signal.

Most HN threads are not that big, I think it'd do just fine with (reverse?) chronological ordering.

Yes, this is what forums and mailing lists used to do (well, they're still doing it, there just aren't as many).

When Digg introduced voting on links, it was initially seen as having way better content than the rest. And then Reddit did it with comments as well, and nobody looked back.

The main reason, I think, is that nobody read a whole thread. They look at the few top level comments (in upvoted threads) or at the last ones (in a forum/mail threads) and will reply to that - so that the quality of the whole discussion is determined by what people see first.

That being said, it indeed comes with a lot of problems of its own. Upvotes/downvotes favor hive mind thinking (you want to be loved, so you'll give people what they want) and mobs (if something is downvoted, you'll just add one more downvote).

A couple years ago, I went back to using mailing lists and it's indeed a less frustrating experience, from my point of view. But I'm not sure it's about the technical aspect, it may just be because there are just less people in it.

The ones with the shock value tend to get bigger though. Chronological ordering would emphasize either the first or the last comment, and given that these are two out of many, it's unlikely that either of them is the best comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com