> pushes content triggering strong emotional reactions should be banned
Aren't you describing your own comment? Aren't upvotes pushing that to the top? So isn't HN the thing that needs to be banned according to your comment?
Aren't you describing your own comment? Aren't upvotes pushing that to the top? So isn't HN the thing that needs to be banned according to your comment?
It's imperfect, but afaik most social media does the opposite (all "engagement" is good engagement), and I imagine, say, Twitter would be much nicer if it tuned its algo to not propagate posts with an unusually high view/retweet count relative to likes.
HN doesn't have a concept of engagement really. It has a controversy downranking algorithm which downranks a story if it has a low vote:comment ratio, but this is what happens on Reddit as well (you can sort by Controversial on old Reddit to surface those threads.) There's no such downweighing to comments which is why the comments that float to the top are inevitably the ones that hit the site's common in-group ("circlejerk") opinion.
The downranking helps the front page to not be overwhelmed by flamebait but that's it really. As HN has gotten more popular, more and more of it gets dominated by its in-group opinion, and most of those opinions are all negative ones. Social networks are bad, crypto is bad, finance is evil, big tech is bad, enshittification, etc. It's almost impossible to have any conversation on those topics as you'll just get downvoted if you disagree and if you agree, even if your agreement is incoherent, you'll get upvotes.
The rest of the site's "algorithm" is usually through hand moderation by the professional mod team (dang, tomhow, et al, who get paid to moderate aka they are professionals) and that's a pretty big distinction from most of the other big social media sites which mostly rely on automated systems or volunteers.
So I mean "it's imperfect" is a stretch. HN is often just as bad as most of the other sites, if not worse. If you're going to advocate for banning social media if you end up using any rigorous definition of an "algorithm" HN will end up banned as well. In my experience though the people that want to ban other social media seem to resonate with HN and so they think that it's "better" along some axis that's not measurable. To me that smells of in-group bias.
They are qualitatively distinct. Facebooks' algorithm is demonstrably harmful. HN's not so much.
[0] https://imgur.com/we-should-improve-society-somewhat-T6abwxn
My point, overall, is that there is all the criticism of social media that excludes HN is based on vibes. And if we're about to ban social media for the EU then hopefully we have more than vibes to go off of.