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Comment by freemint | Hacker News Reader

> How many people who cut off a limb and regretted it would stick around the forum that fed their compulsion to do it?

Maybe many more then you would think. First of all of there are others with regrets they are most likely also found there. Second to warn others. Thirdly to vent.

I agree that the evidence is not the highest quality but i have a hard time imagining a more involved study design that would pass by any ethic board.

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> First of all of there are others with regrets they are most likely also found there. Second to warn others. Thirdly to vent.

I don't find that the least bit credible. The proposition forum administrators would tolerate someone "warning others" against the core uniting aspect of their community is not realistic. Generally anyone who questions orthodoxy in such niche communities face vitriol and get banned quickly. Apostates do not hang around religious conversion forums talking about deconversion, gender transition desisters are not welcome on transgender support forums etc.

Then one could surely find multiple occurrences of externally archived but deleted forum post showing just that. You are implicitly asking for proof of absence of such censorship. This is an unreasonable standard.

Preventing motivated people from harassing others on a forum is impossible if anyone can join the forum.

I wonder if it's similar to Amazon ratings, where review distributions seem to skew toward people who either love the thing, or hate it? Presumably there's actual research on this. ... Okay here's something about the J-shaped distribution (mostly 5 stars, some 1 stars, little in between) in reviews [1]. (Edit: here's another, more recent summary [2] of polarity in reviews.)

Would we expect the same in something as intimate as amputating pieces of your own body? Hmmm.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1562764.1562800

[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002224372094183...

Off-topic, but I think the effect is even more pronounced with a binary rating (thumb up/thumb down) vs a 1-5 star rating. I've noticed that really bad or mediocre games will take advantage of the upvote tendency by advertising "90% positive reviews" in an attempt to trick people into thinking they're good.

> Maybe many more then you would think. First of all of there are others with regrets they are most likely also found there. Second to warn others. Thirdly to vent.

And how would you find those posts after they were banned and deleted?

Google tends to cache pages for a long time, banned users usually leave a long trail (and post on sites where they will not get banned) and deleted posts can be resolved by finding and asking the user in question. And usually people with regrets tend to be very, very loud in scenarios like this.

I skimmed the paper and couldn't find where they say they looked for those users and posts that you mention. Maybe I missed it, can you point me to where does it say they make an honest effort to find those people?

I wouldn't say that failing to at least try to look for the less-than-enthusiastic people makes this paper criminally dangerous pseudoscience, but it certainly gives me pause.

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