I tend to avoid reading social news comments | Hacker News Reader

I tend to avoid reading social news comments

rubenerd.com

72 pointsTomte71 comments

I don't know if there is a way to measure it, but there is a big increase in spitefulness in online conversation. I 'm not even sure it is driven by karma-hunters because it seems people care less about it, but there is a desire to publicly display antisocial behavior. Maybe because antisocial is more tolerated now?

Bad faith is the driver. It's probably a majority of people now who respond in bad faith. They assume that everyone is talking in bad faith, probably to justify their own bad faith. Maybe it represents a broader shift in attitudes. That's also why humor and sarcasm are not tolerated, because people assume bad faith behind it. This was markedly different in the 90s and 00s where any joke was allowed and the intent was always assumed to be humor.

I think there might be a split in world views. There is a new emerging set of beliefs that are incompatible with some more traditional beliefs. When discussing them people tend to focus on the consequences of these beliefs and not the axioms. It also seems that people are not willing to agree to disagree online. Yet they're often happy to in offline relationships. I think this is a consequence of how superficial online interactions are.

HN appears, to me, as one shining light in the darkness. Conversations here remain civil. I have just deleted my Twitter account for that very reason. If they had an army of Dangs they might be able to moderate to the degree that HN does. However I don't think Dangs scale.

My take is that it's the scale of things that pits the entire world against itself in every issue. Because irregardless what belief you have, whatever your take is, chances are there exists an individual that is passionate about the exact opposite of your take. And the global interconnectedness has removed all barriers from instantly arguing, in some cases letting you setup keyword searches that notifies you when your "enemy" dares to speak up. Add to that the fact where there's lots of passion there's less of reason. Which will make you more inclined to argue in bad faith.

I think that you nailed it. I would add that as long as we don't reach for rocks to throw at each other (or the online equivalent), having and respectfully expressing diverging opinions is okay.

Slaboj Zizek had something to say apropos this that still troubles me. Former Yugoslavia was obviously built on an uneasy, contrived social balance, but it was not beneath the surface. According to Zizek humour was racist, disgusting, commonplace and absolutely accepted part of life. It started to disappear leading up to 1991, replaced by a "chilling political correctness". He suggested that a culture of rude banter was a necessary safety valve, and silence portends violence. It seems plausible, but I've never heard another former Yugoslav confirm that, and Zizek talks a lot of tosh sometimes.

I got mild dang scolding for one unduly snarky comment a year or so back and really appreciated it.

One of my favorite online communities back in its heyday was somethingawful. You had to make a one-time token payment of a few bucks to be able to post, and they'd triumphantly ban you at the first or (usually) second hint of obnoxiousness.

yes, somethingawful was a very unique site. Especially under clever writes like Frolixo, whose humor I still miss. It was a kind of humor that was mildly abrasive yet not too much as to be toxic. You just sort of knew it was humor. I guess the site is still up, but last time I checked it had lost its funny.

This behaviour is not just limited to culture war topics (or even controversial tech topics like Electron). I think there's some level of the literal point scoring with karma encouraging point scoring types of conversation on any topic

Yes, the entire purpose of karma is to encourage people to do whatever makes the number go up and not do whatever makes the number go down. On HN the assumption seems to be that people will tend to upvote civil, substantive, thought provoking comments and downvote everything else, but in reality all such systems tend towards a path of least resistance to reward - people will do what's easiest to gain karma, not what's best, and what that is tends to be extremely context sensitive.

I can agree with that. Luckily, karma, as implemented here, doesn't seem to prevent people from sharing what they have to say. Not like on Slashdot where karma really is a bitch. Been there for 20+ years and still think it's an awful to moderate because we have the same 20 guys dominating almost every discussion

I think the HN karma is subtle enough not to take it too seriously, and yet it's still there to give you the signal your comments may be out line. When I first started reading HN, I didn't even realize there was a karma feature. I also like how there are no notifications, so it doesn't feed a back and forth argument from continuing past its expiration. It may be a little less convenient, but it seems to strike the right balance.

> Bad faith is the driver. It's probably a majority of people now who respond in bad faith

Worse than that: it's very close to universal on some sites, like Twitter.

> They assume that everyone is talking in bad faith, probably to justify their own bad faith.

Yep, it's a positive feedback loop.

I sense a deep fear of inadequacy in a lot of online comments. People feel they need to say something that's accepted by the forum, so they often go for chest-thumping. They also fear saying something that will require argumentation, so a lot of discussions that could be meaningful end up being slagging matches, that way you can play it to a draw: say something rude and then when the other person is offended you point at how they focused on being offended rather than the argument. The other person will then point at how the first person was rude in order to avoid the issues, so basically both are right.

There really is something about it being online that makes this terrible. I've never seen in real life debate that things deteriorated to what one reads regularly online.

I don't really like arguments, but I really hate to do it online, moreover on online forum. There's so much social aspect happen when doing argument or discussion when offline, or at least with voice call.

With online text, I feel like each party only try to defend their own point and will not meeting concussion. On online forum, it's just a waste of time.

It's a lack of consensus, not a search for validation. This is a natural (and fairly well understood) consequence of "diverse" democracies.

There is a big difference between rebuttals by an expert for a post and general commentary.

This is specifically prevalent in the financial information space. Last week the news broke that the Twitter deal won't close.

Naturally, everyone who thinks of themselves as relevant needed to comment on it (myself included) Some people with valuable information others with less valuable information.

On Twitter / Stocktwits / Discord / Telegram commentary and rebuttal merge which makes it really hard to follow the threads.

On WSJ, Seeking Alpha, etc, the UGC articles are very long and don't encourage a proper discourse. The reason WSB on Reddit was so successful (14M users) was the simple fact that they encourage an online discussion that is weighted by quality.

"WSB weighted by quality"? What am I missing here?

The basic functionality of Reddit includes upvotes and downvotes that provide a ranking which arguably can be seen to measure quality. Second, quality lies in the eye of the beholder. ;-)

Probably a few k worth of gamestop money.

It varies from community to community.

Reddit tends to be really critical - almost deliberately mean - even when the original author is part of the discussion. The culture there rewards dunking on other people.

On the other hand, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn users have been more supportive when I share my work. Posting here actually feels good.

I try to be a nicer commenter. Some time ago I read my post History and realised that I acted like an asshole online. Now I express my approval and gratitude more often, and I moderate my criticism. If I have nothing nice to say, I say nothing. I try to keep the same tone I would in meatspace. It's easy to forget that there are humans on the other end, especially when I'm in a bad mood myself.

Damn it! I have to be half-serious.

> People assume that any review or discussion must target them or their interests, preferences, requirements, or circumstances; therefore anything else is an affront.

Great observation. So why? Why does that happen? That's the interesting thing, isn't it?

Why do people assume it's all about them? Or react that way? Why are they so deeply entrenched in their beliefs? Because they are correct? All of them?

That's where it gets interesting because it gets closer to a real definition of a problem instead of a set of symptoms.

My theory is they can't build anything worthwhile themselves, so they find something popular but with problems, which allows their ego to divert attention away from their own inadequacies.

“Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark.”

-John Barth

I wonder if there's a degree of FOMO there.

People feel like they must participate in everything, so when there's something new that they didn't discover and research first, they compensate by doing some armchair criticism. If it were their had discovered it they'd say it's the coolest ever.

It's funny, I thought this was an internet phenomena, but I've been seeing this all the time in meetups lately. Someone presents something that clearly works fine for their use case, and someone takes the mic to ask a question but eviscerates it instead.

I also remember this with teenagers and music: the assholes always auto-dislike things others bring, and criticise the stupidest things, but if they rediscover it themselves it's the best band in the world.

Myself, I prefer pretending I already know the stuff being presented. ;)

I think this is a sort of non-humility thing. A humble person with humility would react with something like "oh cool! I had no idea this existed but I love it! Thanks for sharing this with me!"

I have found myself on the other side of the coin many times. I have researched something, or invested a lot of time/energy/money in something and then someone who I assume (unconsciously or not) has not done these things and I instantly dismiss. E.g. if my mum turns up one day with a new phone and tries to tell me how great it is, there is no way (in my closed mind opinion) that she would have found something that I was not already aware of and using etc - what I picked and what I use is clearly superior for reasons X Y and Z and I will sub-conciously reassure myself that I am correct by pointing out why she is wrong. I guess it is a sort of pride/arrogance (and maybe even tribalism) thing - a sort of "you think you know something, but I know better than you, so I will explain to you how you are wrong as I know more than you about this. I am right and you are wrong, and I need to prove the point so you know that you are wrong" etc. Not just tech - people will do this about cars, sports, tools - anything.

I try to stop myself being in this mindset as much as possible, and try to be more open to what others suggest.

Because it's normal for humans as I see it to be selfish, and we've built systems that force selfish desires to clash repeatedly.

Selfishness has a bad reputation, but in fact it's how you end up not starving and broke in the street and able to keep a safe life. Pure altruism taken to a logical extreme would be dangerous, so there's always a balance of self-preservation based on your own wants and needs.

When you go to any public forum, nothing is really different; you do the things you desire and that protect yourself, you talk about the things you're comfortable about, you can most effectively comment about your experience and how items relate to you.

Where the problem with the above comes out is when this aspect gets out of alignment as well, as pure selfishness is just as disastrous. At a certain point to obtain your desires, you need _something_ from someone else, and likely that gets forgotten on social media that without the someone else, there is no social media. All other things in life require the contribution of human labor somewhere, even with more reliance on automation (someone's gotta maintain those machines and the code, even Star Trek still had an Engineering staff running around fixing replicators that made bad coffee/tea). By forgetting this, people feel entitled to having it exactly as they want, and why not? It's their leisure time, shouldn't it be exactly what they want to relax?

I absolutely understand the author's point, but in a sense, they're doing the exact same thing, and trying to define a requirement for social media that not necessarily everyone subscribes to. I happen to think this requirement is a good one, but not the point I suppose. Once you allow public access, you have to accept also the bad, and maybe even revel in it a bit.

And let's not forget how algorithms exacerbate this issue.

Older "anything-goes" simple forums appeal to me mostly because you get exposure to things you normally wouldn't and there's no feed that gets polluted with bad data if you just check it out and there's no rewards system to push the content up; you just have some entries in your browser history. The users that do try to make the forums "their own" get the option to do so without having a feed/rewards system push this data heavily, and users have an easier time avoiding such content. There's a safety valve for their desire without some system forcing their desire on others.

Feeds/rewards systems really muck up the situation because exploring a topic you aren't interested in or even dislike comes back to bite you in the ass because feeds aren't very good at getting when you're just checking something out versus when you're interested; any interaction is a change to induce further engagement so the feed tries. Rewards systems that promote content do much the same, but the system is powered by humans (and bots) instead.

You touched on some good points here in a well written way. I very much agree that “old school” forums without all the modern social media gamification are great. It seems to me this hinges on a notion of utility/purpose for the website: Technical “old school” forums (engines/code for me personally) exist for problem solving, trouble shooting, and beyond. Where social media, by definition, has a purely/predominately “social” existence. It’s unfortunate “social” on the Internet has been hijacked by user tracking and attention hijacking for ads

'why' matters only if it helps fixing it. People who attempt to fix the internet usually want to make it be more about them

The internet was built in the last 10yrs to hyper-personalize everything and silo everybody off into their recommendation zones. I don't see people doing anything other than what they were trained to do by the algorithms they surf.

Of course people think the content they read has been sculpted to their taste or otherwise pushed deliberately in their face.

I find this very noticeable here in HN. Every time something new pops up, some people are very quick to dismiss, criticise the author for making another "X", or to ask "why would I need this" without doing an iota of research. Well, maybe the post is not for everyone.

Of the news sources I frequent, HN is the only one where I bother with the comments. In fact, I often find myself reading the discussion here _before_ the article.

It’s not perfect (we are people, in the end) but this community is refreshingly mature, insightful, and respectful. Thanks, all.

Similar feeling, but I'm on the verge to quit HN too.

I was trying to go through all the research that has been done on how to understand the internet recently, and I found a jem. A book called No Sense of Place, it reads like Aristotle:) the way he was trying to correct the philosophers before him, but I still have a couple of chapters to finish.

(btw, something very important in order to understand that book and others before it, is to give up on that fancy abstract idea that the internet is just "flow of information", this idea appeal to programmers for obvious reasons, and it is the most silly way to look at the internet)

Alone Together is very good too, the way Turkle focuses on empathy is important I guess.

That all is being said, but some people on the internet deserve to be attacked, or proven wrong let's say, if I am in a good day that I think it won't exhaust my soul, I will do it.

"Maybe the web, BBSs, forums, mailing lists, and chat rooms were always like this."

Life is like that, has always been and will continue to be like that, get used to it.

You might be interested in adding Wealth of Networks to your list. At this point of time it may perhaps be more of a misunderstanding of things but it is a fascinating take on how things could have been understood before social media took over.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks

(btw, thanks for the book tip)

Oh, thanks very much, any addition to this is precious for me. Hugs to you :)

How is the internet not just flow of information?

Because that view doesn't tell us anything.

Debatable. It’s a helpful heuristic especially when looking at population level effects of information flow through the internet.

There may also be other useful views but viewing the internet as flow of information is undoubtedly useful to some degree though it’s of course not a complete picture

It is like saying body organs are collections of cells. It is correct, but too abstract to tell anything.

Yeah that’s fair, though understanding our body organs as having cells as fundamental units is actually an insight that leads to a lot of other actionable intelligence we wouldn’t have if we weren’t able to ‘atomize’ them into smaller constituent parts.

I get what you’re saying though and I do agree that in general it’s not radically helpful just thinking of the internet as information flow. But it depends on the problem set. For example when wondering how people or various communities get informed, identifying their news sources (and thus information flow) is invaluable in understanding their most likely held positions on things. That being said, this doesn’t just include the internet so I guess it goes back to your point of information flow, esp. just regarding the internet, is prly too abstract to be of much radical use without further differentiating it or incorporating other insights

I agree, most books does this actually, they have different perspectives on how a specific kind of flow affects social behavior. But no one says it is just a flow of information, and that's it, bye bye, I solved it. I saw some programmers do exactly that before. Because we are addicted to abstraction.

I also avoid reading news comments 90% of the time, I'm usually too busy to spend time reading and writing comments. Lately I've lucked into some spare time, so I have been indulging a bit.

It feels good to discuss global meanings that everybody shares on social media sites. For anything really worthwhile, personally relatable or you haven't completely thought-through, it is very difficult to convey cleanly without being crushed by the local hive-mind.

Most conversations have to fit inside a generic framing device, which is set by the website you're on, once you clue into the rules of the game, a lot of interest in reading and writing comments can fall away unintentionally. The kinds of comments you get, are the same again and again.

I think there was a study showing that humans will gladly engage in unethical / repulsing behavior if there were zero consequences in doing so, and it's why the internet is such an awful place. It's global unwritten rule of "talk shit, get hit" that keeps us in check and that doesn't exist in the anonymous internet.

Since the 90s internet has swallowed the world, and this changed it completely. The big platforms replaced the wild west of protocols, but this shift also changed content, from peer-to-peer to creator-consumer. This creator-consumer coupled with adds is how you get populations of people that feel so completely entitled: regular people are used to being the center of universal attention.

A number of my blog posts over the years have hit #1 on HN. I've noticed that HN commenters are more likely to follow the "guidelines" with each other than with the article author. Too often, the author is treated uncharitably, with contempt and/or ridicule.

I've spoken to dang personally about this at some length, but I wasn't really satisfied with his response, which was more or less a denial of the problem, or at least a refusal to do anything about it. Honestly, I've occasionally thought of blacklisting HN referrers from my web server, though I've never gone through with such a drastic measure.

I've found that the best way to handle it is to take matters into my own hands, create an account here, and reply in the comments. I can clarify my points and shoot down uncharitable reactions. It's a shame that authors have to self-manage the responses though. Left to themselves, HN commenters often becomes vicious wolves. I would say that the HN guidelines are worthless if the same respect isn't given to the article authors.

I think there's not a great way for people to learn how to be pro-social on fear forums. The feedback signals and coaching that help people develop social skills IRL are much, much weaker online and reputation has much less value. Moreover, a lot of people are initially attracted to these forums due to lack of success in IRL contexts. And then there's often these parasocial assymetries between the authors, who have high reputation and visibility, and the commenters.

I don't want to paint the state of digital forums in a completely negative light. Online communities keep it real, to an extent. There are many examples of high reputation people getting much deserved pushback, when they're used to sycophancy IRL. And there are also many occasions where valuable insights from fairly anonymous people float to the surface, due to the democratization of these forums.

It's interesting that 30 years into the Internet, the problem of facilitating digital community is still very much unsolved.

> assume things about the author that are hilariously and transparently false

I run into this, a lot.

I'm 60, and don't hide the fact. I get "OK, Boomer"'d* all the time. It sucked, when it happened when I was still looking for work, but it's mostly amusing, these days.

It appears that the very fact that I exist, is enough to drive some folks into a rage. It seems to piss them off, even more, when they find out that I'm actually fairly good at some of the stuff that younger folks are into.

I had an interaction, some months ago (maybe more. My enfeebled mind has become palsied with eld, and I lose track), with a chap that just started slapping at me, out of the blue. When I suggested that it might be better to try making friends with me, rather than starting our relationship with an attack, he admitted that he is (and, I guess, many others, are) pretty upset at my generation for making a hash of the world.

Can't really say I blame the sentiment, but, in my case, that's hilariously off the mark.

I just suggest that prejudice/bigotry (which is what ageism is) tends to be fairly destructive, and seldom gives positive results.

And, course, in some contexts, it’s actually illegal, but that doesn’t seem to deter many folks.

I also get attacked because I'm an Apple developer. That's not new at all. I've been weathering that, since the 1990s. The ageism is a lot more recent. I suspect that may have something to do with my well-coiffed pompadour, taking on a rather fetching shade of gray.

*At 60, I'm not really a "Boomer." I'm in that weird generation between "Boomer," and "X." We're the ones Dazed and Confused was about. My older siblings are "Boomers."

I believe the Boomer definition generally includes births from the stretch of 1946–1962 so, if you’re 60, you’re a (fellow) Boomer, but barely.

I'm nearing 67, so can relate tremendously to everything you said.

I’d have to find the article that talked about it, but I think the years were like ‘59-‘64, where we were too young to be drafted, and too old to be punks, and how it gave our generation a different “mindset” from the “traditional” boomers.

You might want to look into "Generation Jones" which covers the younger half of the more traditional Boomer definition (e.g. my older brother) plus some of the very earliest part of GenX (e.g. me). It's quite distinct from early Boomers, including in some of the ways you just mentioned. To the extent that generational boundaries and labels make any sense at all, it seems like a somewhat useful grouping to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones

the web2.0 era didn't bring a lot of good fruits.. the time wasted to makes transient comments on articles that will do nothing but annoy people around.

Obligatory plug for shutup.css and the browser plug-ins derived from it:

> shutup.css is a CSS stylesheet that can be applied to your web browser to hide comment sections on many popular websites.

https://github.com/panicsteve/shutup-css

I feel the same in general. I was naive enough trying to convince them but it turned out in most of the cases I was wasting my time: they either deliberately took it wrong or simply could not comprehend it at all. In neither case there wouldn't be any point trying to discuss. So virtually I stopped reading or replying on most sites, HN is one of the few I haven't stopped yet, but I feel it won't last long too.

> I have little motivation to separate the wheat from the proverbial chaff anymore.

That’s what it comes down to, really. Comment quality distribution certainly follows a bell curve. Voting helps bubble up the best top-level comments. But if you start reading the sub-comments, you’re on your own.

That’s not new, that is how it has been putting one’s voice out since the invention of speech…

The pompeii grafiti were not particularly “front page material”.

> Voting helps bubble up the best top-level comments.

Does it? Seems like early top-level comments take on a life of their own. Everyone wants to reply to the top top-level comment (possibly to maximize the chances of their own comment getting noticed, or possibly just because it's the first thing they see on the page). And the way HN is designed, with discussions expanded by default, you may have to scroll down quite ways on the page to even get to another top-level comment, much less multiple top-level comments.

Crazy idea: how about presenting comments at each level in a random order on each page load, and get rid of voting? There could still be flagging to hide the worst comments.

I'm not sure of the exact details, but HN does have some feature whereby a new comment is displayed at the very top for a few minutes. I see this often when opening an active article. But there is definitely an early-mover advantage in terms of visibility.

Thanks for the article, author. Curious if the same goes for social media in general? Probably in vain to ask here because they’ll never see it heh. I agree HN is better than most. Have personally found technical forums (engine/vehicle/diesel etc) to be higher quality as well - but what are we comparing to here, youtube?

But where else can you easily find racist climate change deniers who communicate in English worse than the people they're attacking?

so much "news" now is clickbait or designed to infuriate, so don't expect much from those comments.

what i dislike the sanitization of comments like youtube. top comments are some overly sugary kind of simping comment only. sort by new and you might see a contrarian view, before its deleted.

Oh, well let's put this on a social site, then. That'll show them!

You do realize the author and submitter are not necessarily the same person right?

YouTube is full of propaganda comments (from Russia / China / right wing), it is toxic

it depends on the site, often comments provide more insight/context than the article itself in MSM

Which is to say, "Almost always". They can make whatever objections they want ("trolls!", "racists!", "climate-deniers!") but news sites and many of their readers don't like comments because they don't want randoms destroying a 4000 word article with a quick "Here is why you are wrong."

Same. Most sites should shut comments off. People would share links with their actual friends and family rather than rant like children at anonymous strangers.

This it, everyone. Take away all the words and your literal routine is it until the end.

Human languages are 5,000 years old, while human intuition for quantity; enough food, heat, shelter, has evolved with us for millions of years. I find the human gibberish exhausting, and useless. Anyone else wants to pull out Marx they’re going in front of a bus.

You all are going to wake up, do some utilitarian work, goto bed. Stfu, please.

Comments under news have few usages beside making click for ads:

- tracing single individuals ideas, attitude for the future western-Chinese social score;

- tracing how people react to the article as a driver for new articles

- eliciting potentially emerging ideas who might be interesting for a new article or interested to block them, writing an article that appear in the same line but diverge to completely different results

For us "readers" they are just useful to find extra infos by commenters who know something and decide to share, touch the climate a bit less than the media but still a view of a certain cohort of users ideas etc. That's is.

Solid piece of serious satire.

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