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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Twitter in particular seems to reward snark and negativity more than anything else.

People can get vicious in Show HN threads, as well.

As someone who has gone through the inquisition, and dreaded it, it wasn't that bad. Show HN attracts criticism, yes, but it's mostly concrete and specific. Generic PR speak doesn't work, but if you address the comments in a direct, honest way, people generally understand that your stuff can't be perfect and that there are tradeoffs. A large part of Show HN has a different target user in mind than this crowd, and that's ok.

Snark OTOH, especially at an individual who is only representing themself, is just mean. Of course it happens here too, but it's rare. Reddit and Twitter are completely plagued by it – it usually gets the most engagement, whereas here it's rare and gets a chilly response.

Finally, there's one more differentiator. Twitter is people-oriented, you have a profile, usually your real name, and public follower count. Twitter is designed to be a popularity contest. Both hacker news and reddit are content-oriented. Sure, there's a username, but most people don't give a shit about who you are.

On HN unsubstantial put-downs are downvoted/flagged. On Twitter they get hearts and lols. That’s a pretty big difference.

(And yes, like another comment said, HN voting is also shit when it comes to certain topics like big tech. Fortunately the crappiest takes upvoted by mobs tend to be modded down by saner humans.)

Tomato tomato in my mind. On HN you're more likely to find nitpicky objections and backhanded compliments instead, but there's still people who will come into the thread just to tell you they think you're a bad engineer failing to solve irrelevant problems. Which, to be clear, is bullying.

Yes. HN is kind of like Stack Overflow in how vicious it can be, but like Stack Overflow, anything that looks like an actual attack gets removed. So the people learn to be vicious and a bit subtle about it. Or you get a storm of nitpicks and minor objections to something you say. People going into threads about language X to ask why anyone use a language with such obvious shortcomings.

Well, the point is that we need to realize there is always a human being on the other side of the comment / post. On Twitter that might not always be true. And these players may have been created for the sole purpose to troll / egg / incite.

I think this is kind of flipped around. On some level the difference between bot and troll is irrelevant, because I care about account behavior. Just like how at some level it is irrelevant whether the behavior is intentional or born of ignorance. Moderation is there to control behavior and content, not to control people.

The primary thing people on HN don't understand about Twitter is the personalized feed. On HN, if someone makes low-quality posts, everyone sees it until it gets downvoted into oblivion. On Twitter, if someone's making posts you don't want to see, you block or mute the account and see less of it.

What makes a post "low-quality" is inherently subjective, but HN doesn't offer any personalization. I'd characterize HN's approach as being like a little Puritan village in the 17th century, where community members get together to decide someone's fate. Twitter is like a modern city... if you don't like the neighborhood, go somewhere else. Yes, there are trolls on Twitter. But you don't have to see them on your feed. The impact of an individual troll account on Twitter is much lower than the impact of an individual troll account on HN.

My general feeling is that very few people actually understand how community management works, even in broad strokes. Certainly not me. As a result, behavior which might be a red flag on one forum may just be part of the ecosystem in another forum.

> On HN, if someone makes low-quality posts, everyone sees it until it gets downvoted into oblivion.

I very, very rarely see that in merely low-quality posts. Those that are actually downvoted enough to be hidden are hidden for good reasons. I am sure you could find a handful, but I have never seen a hidden post about which I regretted it was not visible (I’d be curious to see how many you can find). It usually is proper bullying or racist rants.

Now, stories get flagged regularly because they go against the grain, and there are several of them I wish we could have discussed. But looking at the new stories, the flagging mechanism gets rid of much more spam than unpopular posts.

Anyway, I am not really willing to buy that without some statistics.

> As a result, behavior which might be a red flag on one forum may just be part of the ecosystem in another forum.

That is certainly true. But I find HN to be on the good side in that respect. Much better than the anything goes of *chan, the constant shitposting of mainstream subreddits (though there are some subreddits I love with great communities), or the constant passive aggressiveness of ./ and el reg (at least when I frequented those; I never looked back after leaving). Ars is nice as well, but a huge troll magnet.

> On Twitter, if someone's making posts you don't want to see, you block or mute the account and see less of it.

The biggest problem with this idea is that there are tweets that you may have legitimate reasons not to want others to see. If someone is smearing you online in some way (revenge porn, lies about your actions, doxxing, stoking others to attack you, etc), then it doesn't really help you to hide these tweets from your feed, you need to have some recourse to hide them from others' feeds to actually achieve something.

Of course, this gets complicated often because it's not easy to tell apart lies about your actions from truths about your actions for example, and any mechanism you have to protect you from someone spreading false hurtful information is also a tool that someone else can use to prevent others spreading true hurtful information. Perhaps the court system is the only good way to solve it - I don't have an answer. But this problem also can't simply be ignored by hiding that person from your feed.

Aren't we forgetting Snarkis Prime, Stack Overflow?

I noted something similar with colleague and friends. I really seem to bring out the worst in people, I'm not sure what it is.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend that it is always really considerate and nuanced in every conversation (and other social network), except, Twitter where it becomes kinda vicious, or it managed always express an opinion in the most polarizing way possible. I didn't seem to realized it until I show some of the tweet it posted.

It's the short format : makes it so much less likely for an explanation, even a followup one.

It's a problem with all social media. As soon as subreddit becomes big enough all the most upvoted comments will be low effort snark. If there's a way to find a negative angle bashing someone/something it will be there. It's also happening on HN for certain topics (big tech etc).

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