Comment by sleepysysadmin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sleepysysadmin | Hacker News Reader

Never downvote. If a comment was just racial slurs or something, others will downvote. Otherwise, never downvote an idea regardless of 'provocativeness' or otherwise. In fact the provocative approach can often be what breaks cognitive dissonance. hunter s thompson or matt taibbi for example do this well. Gonzo journalism is easier to consume than yellow journalism coming from mass media.

>For example, I'll sometimes see a massively downvoted comment that's constructive and beautifully written, but it carries an opinion that is not currently popular for whatever reason.

Agreed. This is toxic to community and shuts down discussion. In fact I might even suggest that this happening essentially breaks the community. Not sure what to call it, but its not a community anymore.

>I believe that downvoting someone just because you disagree with them is terrible for a discussion network like HN. Moreover, I would say that I learned the most from the comments that I disagreed with - on all levels, politically, technologically, personally.

This is really bad on HN. Not as bad as Reddit obviously. This has been more recently bad because we are a society inflection point. Reddit/HN are just the battlegrounds. Hell even the universities are battegrounds. Back in the day the universities were all about free speech and having diverse discussions about everything. Today? That sure isnt happening anymore.

The exercise here isn't about how to get better discussions. It's about identifying the discussions you're not allowed to have. Climate change for example is completely off limits. Why is it off limits? There's a significant number of people who believe we are on the verge of human extinction. To argue against climate change in any degree is tantamount to encouraging or contributing to our extinction. That's literally terms of war.

It's interesting to try to find all the issues you aren't allowed to discuss on HN. You can then also see who is doing it and why. The curious thing is why they are so secretive.

When you understand, how does it work out? What's going to be the event that fixes this? It's going to take a major event. World war against china? A greater depression? They are right and we will be extinct in about 10 years? It's unclear what it will be, but there's something bad coming.

> Not sure what to call it, but its not a community anymore.

I've been thinking of this and spaces start to feel like an old-school gathering of snake oil salesmen: The primary interest starts to be either attracting upvotes/avoiding downvotes or 'presenting' oneself rather than finding people who share your interests.

> It's interesting to try to find all the issues you aren't allowed to discuss on HN. You can then also see who is doing it and why. The curious thing is why they are so secretive.

You want SUPER interesting, compare which topics you can discuss where. I love social computing and have been talking to people online since UseNet. What's interesting to me about the recent era is that the big players go out of their way to prevent new platforms from taking hold outside of their influence. Back in the day, if a mod was being out of pocket, you could just LEAVE and start your own listserve/IRC stuff/etc, and if admin in general went overboard, people would leave. (Remember Digg -> Reddit, or LJ -> Tumblr, or the protocol wars in the 90s and why we all ended up on the Web)?

Now if any platform gets big enough that allows for dissent, the current big guys just buy it out and censor it.

Unfortunately, this also means that the places that DO let you discuss these things also tend to be contrarian cesspools with no ideology other than 'you can't tell me what to do' which is terrible for discussion for OTHER reasons (4Chan, I'm looking at you).

>I've been thinking of this and spaces start to feel like an old-school gathering of snake oil salesmen: The primary interest starts to be either attracting upvotes/avoiding downvotes or 'presenting' oneself rather than finding people who share your interests.

Yes, that's what I tend to see.

>You want SUPER interesting, compare which topics you can discuss where. I love social computing and have been talking to people online since UseNet. What's interesting to me about the recent era is that the big players go out of their way to prevent new platforms from taking hold outside of their influence.

Parler and others yep.

>Now if any platform gets big enough that allows for dissent, the current big guys just buy it out and censor it.

Even to the point where government takes tiktok to court and such. Like it's pretty big.

>Unfortunately, this also means that the places that DO let you discuss these things also tend to be contrarian cesspools with no ideology other than 'you can't tell me what to do' which is terrible for discussion for OTHER reasons (4Chan, I'm looking at you).

Here I think I disagree. 4chan does have /b/ which is a cesspool but you can get conversations in all the other boards. That's the point of the design. The problem with 4chan is that it doesn't persist well enough.

> Parler and others yep.

Parler sunk itself in a different way. (As did the other right wing anti-censorship social media like Voat, Gab, etc.) In order to build a functioning platform, you need one of two things in your founding community:

1.) A lot of people. Basically a critical mass of normies. This is the TikTok strategy: Everybody can find something for them because there are enough people on the app, so they stay. It's a self-sustaining virtuous cycle.

2.) Some kind of special population that is unique or admired enough that uninvolved people want to join in order to involve themselves. This is more the early Web version of adoption: Those of us who were the first non-academics on the Web wanted to hang out here because this is where all the smart people were.

Parler et al. had the problem that their initial userbases were actively offputting to their ability to grow because the content is offputting to most people who aren't involved, so it comes off as culty instead of interesting. This is also an issue on a few lefty social media sites.

That said, while I think Parler et al. are pretty unhinged, I'm not super comfortable with the cheering on of making it more difficult for platforms to access internet logistics.

> Even to the point where government takes tiktok to court and such. Like it's pretty big.

Governments don't have a clue what they're doing in this area. The greatest danger isn't direct government censorship, it's in sousveillance and self-censorship a la Reddit moderator lockstep opinion.

> Here I think I disagree. 4chan does have /b/ which is a cesspool but you can get conversations in all the other boards. That's the point of the design. The problem with 4chan is that it doesn't persist well enough.

It's all related. I have a soft spot in my heart for 4Chan even though I'm far too old for it now. 4Chan was literally founded to be contrarian when it broke off from SA, and that is going to be embedded in its design decisions and culture. It doesn't persist well enough BECAUSE it was founded as a contrarian refuge; it's harder to run a contrarian refuge if people can have sustained identities because it enables things like coalitions and harassment. I think 4Chan and image boards are valuable, just terrible for discussion.

>Parler et al. had the problem that their initial userbases were actively offputting to their ability to grow because the content is offputting to most people who aren't involved, so it comes off as culty instead of interesting. This is also an issue on a few lefty social media sites.

I think you're right, but the reason they were so vehemently attacked was because they didn't want the normies to go. You can recover when the normies show up. That's also the big fear. Places like rumble will likely super boost up normie stuff for this reason.

>Governments don't have a clue what they're doing in this area. The greatest danger isn't direct government censorship, it's in sousveillance and self-censorship a la Reddit moderator lockstep opinion.

I think part of it as well, anything you post on say reddit will be hosted in the usa and it lets their snowden stuff work. If tiktok were hosted in canada or elsewhere. they lose that ability. which is why oracle and microsoft were planning to host it for them. It's about lawful intercept to be sure.

>It's all related. I have a soft spot in my heart for 4Chan even though I'm far too old for it now. 4Chan was literally founded to be contrarian when it broke off from SA, and that is going to be embedded in its design decisions and culture. It doesn't persist well enough BECAUSE it was founded as a contrarian refuge; it's harder to run a contrarian refuge if people can have sustained identities because it enables things like coalitions and harassment. I think 4Chan and image boards are valuable, just terrible for discussion.

And that's totally why they arent a community.

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