Comment by actusual | Hacker News Reader

Comment by actusual | Hacker News Reader

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> I think the basic unit of democracy is the citizen, and the citizen is not a private person. Being a citizen means participating in public life, and public life brings with it, trust, accountability and reputation.

I disagree with this, mostly for the reason that the requirement for trust, accountability and reputation to exist in a society is different person to person when conditioned on wealth. If I have massive wealth, I can participate in society and democracy entirely anonymously. I vote, which is anonymous, and that's it. I have no requirement for trust, accountability and reputation.

Not only that but trust, accountability and reputation are all subjective measures based on who is measuring them. Mark Zuckerberg is trustworthy, accountable, and has high reputation for some folks at FB, while a large number of other people would disagree with that. Who's opinion matters? Has his measures of trust, accountability and reputation changed over time? Additionally, trust, accountability and reputation don't matter to him if he's still one of the richest people on earth.

I agree with you about voting.

But if I'm speaking, reputation usually matters. People want to know whether to assign credibility to what I say, and knowing who I am plays a large part in that.

Now, HN is an interesting example of that. Anyone can read my comment history (unless I create a throwaway for one post), but nobody knows who I am (unless I make my name and/or email address public). Still, I can build up a reputation here, either good or bad. And I do the same for others. "Oh, user X usually has interesting things to say. I was maybe going to skip this comment, but because of who wrote it, I'll read it." Some users get that extra benefit of the doubt, because with me they have built up credibility over time.

This happens in politics, too. Consider the Federalist Papers. At the time, the writers were not known, but they built up a consistent, solid argument. We respect them now, not because of who the writers were, but because of the quality of the material. (If anything, we respect the writers more because of what they wrote, not the other way around.) So this can work in politics - people with a reputation, and still anonymous.

But then there's Q. Q has built up a reputation (both good and bad) while remaining anonymous. But my personal conspiracy theory is that Q was a Russian disinformation campaign. ("Was" is perhaps too optimistic - I would expect Q to re-emerge as we get to the 2022 or 2024 elections.) I would really like to know who Q was, in order that people would have a better basis for judging what Q says.

> Consider the Federalist Papers. At the time, the writers were not known

Everyone knew who wrote the Federalist papers. It was an open secret. People may not have known the specific author of a particular passage or argument, but among the elite debating the constitution (who were the target audience) there was no disguise or mystery regarding the people who were 'Publius.' This gets trotted frequently out as one of the few examples of anonymous political speech having a potential benefit, but given the fact that it was pseudonymous at best I welcome additional examples of actual anonymous political speech that was of any consequence.

Q seemed to be an 'Operation Trust' / операция Трест campaign. The idea is to undermine resistance by pretending there is already one in place and that the secret resistance with a plan that will be eminently successful. It undermines actual resistance. The parallel being Trump supporters being the resistance that didn't do anything (other than make fools of themselves) with the belief that there was a secret plan to keep Trump in power. In this scenario Q would have been created to undermine Trump and his supporters. A large part of propaganda is to make your enemies look foolish. I'm reminded of a Voltaire quote: "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous. ' And God granted it."

Hackernews is an interesting example, as it is HEAVILY moderated, and some would say that this leads to a much higher level of commenting quality.

for most topics, I'd say the quality of conversation is high, but for some topics HN is pretty much an echo chamber. Some unpopular opinions for some topics are down voted pretty heavily, and very quickly.

Sharing an unpopular opinion on certain topics often leads to immediate downvoting of completely unrelated posts made earlier.

"You said something I don't like. Let me just click on your profile and downvote everything I can". Happens surprisingly often

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