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>And clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason.

This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with.

You can actually observe this in this very thread so far: while people express opposite viewpoints at this moment none of the comment are in the negative. I'm sure that on Reddit the hivemind would've decided what the Right Opinion(tm) would be and people disagreeing would be sitting at -200 comment score.

Maybe the system could be pushed further and hide the scores even for your own comments though, removing all gamification. I don't know if it would improve things but I'd be curious to see how it would impact the quality of the discourse.

>otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again?

I mean even on forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/BBSs/imageboards without scoring system (or even publicly identifiable accounts) people would do the same thing, so I think that you overestimate the influence of the scoring system. I guess the closest equivalent on these other forums in general is getting "replies", i.e. engagement with your content, which I suppose is what we really crave in the end. We want people to listen to us.

Beyond that HN does have a few huge quality advantages over other social media. A big one is that the focus is still on textual content, not images and videos which means that you have to take some time to digest every story instead of mindlessly scrolling through the main page one gif at a time.

Newsgroups had scoring.

> Newsgroups had scoring.

News readers had scoring. Neither the NNTP protocol, nor NNTP servers, had a scoring mechanism, and certainly not one that was distributed over the world-wide Usenet infrastructure.

If you think otherwise, can you point to (e.g.) an RFC where it is documented?

I didn’t use newsgroups a huge amount, but certainly some, and none of the clients I used ever had scoring. So to me, newsgroups were completely devoid of ranking.

As mentioned earlier, engagement seemed to be the goal. And the newsgroups I frequented were usually about getting help with a tech problem, or helping someone else out, which has largely been replaced by Stack Overflow.

> This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with.

A lot of people seemed to have liked (do like?) the system that Slashdot came up with: choose a random group of people every day and give them moderator posts to police the discussions. However, if you post in that day you lose your moderator points.

They seem to have gone with a wisdom-of-the-subset-of-the-crowds instead of a wisdom-of-the-entire-crowd/mob.

>This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with. //

Disagree, a lot.

I've railed against it, but pg (the site owner) noted that voting as a proxy for like/dislike was not improper use on HN, much to my chagrin. In the early days (of my use, back on my first HN account) voting seemed mostly to be done to move a comment to it's "proper place".

Nowadays very good comments get greyed to non-readability. I find myself so often vouching for things I disagree with because comments that add well structured, logical, or interesting thoughts get voted out of view because they go against the group norms.

> And surely, you participate in the same process, even if you don't feel as strongly about it - otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again?

Why not? Do you not value discussion, hearing new ideas, learning new concepts, having a soundboard for your thoughts? I also like sharing knowledge and participation in the process of humanity developing its collective memeplex (or at least fooling myself that I'm doing that). The fact that I'm not going to meet the people I discuss with has no bearing at all.

While what you describe in your comment is a factor, I cannot agree the rush is the dominant factor for commenting for me.

>>Why not? Do you not value discussion, hearing new ideas, learning new concepts, having a soundboard for your thoughts

I do, but ultimately, I post because I want someone else to read what I said and comment on it(good or bad). It triggers the same release of oxitocin in my brain that seeing likes on a post does.

Sure. I agree it has addiction potential, which is why I have the noprocrast feature turned on, and have for years. And clearly a lot of people get there "someone is wrong in the internet" fix here. But it wasn't a problem for me in the months of the election, so I didn't have the same need to quit it. Ergo I didn't.

As to the design question, I think the biggest things it's missing for me versus modern social networks in terms of addiction potential: 1) river-of-content setup; 2) algorithmic feed with personalized engagement; 3) images; 4) video; 5) wide topic variety; 6) follow graph; 7) real-world social connections in the platform; 8) on-platform notifications; 9) on-phone notifications.

> why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet

For me this platform is as close as I have to discussing things with my profession. So both with my professional Twitter account and this account, I see it as an opportunity to influence my field a bit and support younger colleagues where I can. Were it not for that, I'd just consume it in a read-only way, as over the years I've come to see on-line argumentation as unhealthy for me.

> clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason

It encourages and prominently displays good quality comments, and discourages and buries poor quality comments. It's not a perfect system as a lot of people vote based on whether they happen to agree rather than based on a comment's quality, but it's much better than nothing.

The same effect would be achieved without showing the numbers though. That's where the addiction comes in.

There's still value in knowing the scores though. When it works, it encourages better conversation, and this effect might be weakened if you couldn't see your comments' scores.

Slashdot's approach is to have different kinds of upvote (Insightful, Funny, etc) and different kinds of downvote (Off-topic, Flamebait, etc), and scores are clamped, iirc the lowest value is -1 and the highest is +5.

https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml

I don't see the numbers on HN? Which is why it is less addictive to me than Reddit. I also lurked for nearly 2 years, as I was concerned about diluting conversations with low quality, unnecessary posts, which are far less frequent on HN than Reddit.

edit: Now I see the numbers. The quality of posts is still far better than Reddit and the interactions less addictive, at least in my experience.

> It encourages and prominently displays good quality comments, and discourages and buries poor quality comments. It's not a perfect system as a lot of people vote based on whether they happen to agree rather than based on a comment's quality, but it's much better than nothing.

Mostly. There is an unconscious hive mind on HN too, and it downvotes when you disagree with it. It just happens that most commenters belong to it, at least most of the time.

> otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again?

The act of writing out your thoughts gives them added clarity. This holds for long(er)-form comment-based sites such as HN and Reddit, not so much for FB and Twitter.

I also left every social media stuff behind. But I consider being on HN and reading some comments here and there as practicing basic human behavior. Its the same in real life, I cant just leave all human interaction behind. I must be able to deal with people. I think I can practice this a little.

I realized the aforementioned, checking my points and who responded what to my thoughts. I actually made an adblock rule to block out my points. So I dont get that rush, because I realized that too, that everytime I arrive at HN, I just checked my points, and if it were more than before, I felt the rush. And I just knew it was bad, and that is not indeed what I come for to this site.

Didn't know HN could lead to this type of addiction.

I use it only as a news delivery system, and in there there's already pathological signs - for instance I rarely skip reading anything that pushbullet displays. And if by accident I "brush it aside" (literally), then I open the app and recover the link.

Kudos for your self-awareness. Have a squirt of dopamine^W^W^W upvote. ;)

I have noticed the same reactions myself, and dislike them. I am slowly and gradually learning to be able to deflect that angry defensive reply impulse. Simple awareness seems to be the first step. I don't know yet what to do about the upvote thrill.

When you first open hacker news, where are your eyes? Are they in the upper right, checking your comment score?

HN is addictive for me, similar to Instagram and TikTok for others.

business only policy, during 9-5. no news/socialmedia, cannot discuss irrelevant issues with my cofounder. Otherwise, I can go into rabbit holes for hours to research certain topic if my brain thinks that it is interesting.

HN is for me in a sense the "front page" of the internet. I'll call it the thinking persons social media. Social? Check. We are here interacting. Media? Check. It's HN's raison d'être. Additive? Check. I check my up-vote score several times a day.

I gave you 1 internet point for this.

Feels familiar, but I'm still in control. Much like with alcohol.