Ask HN: How much of the web is just a race to the bottom? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much of the web is just a race to the bottom?

10 pointsDanielBMarkham8 comments

The recent arrington attack, along with comments about the swank app, the spitting incident, and the point of karma in general has got me to thinking: what's the point?

You try to form a startup to make the world a better place, to provide something of value to somebody. Maybe Joe can keep track of his friends and what they are doing. Maybe Sue can manage her trip itineraries online.

But take a look at the average board, the average user, and the average comments, and I can't help but wondering if ugly doesn't sell. Crude, ugly, disgusting, pandering, pornographic -- you name it. Whatever appeals to the bottom of society is what people reward.

So how about this: a site that takes recent celebrity photographs and has people say disgusting things about the people in the photos. Users could then rank which comments were "best" according to the usual karma system. Or a site that has crime scene photographs, complete with people adding one-liners and rating according to how funny they are?

I'm just venting a bit, but sure as heck looks to me sometimes like the more base, the more animalistic need you fill, the better your site stats are going to be.

Comments?

One of my favorite books is Robert Fulghum’s "All I need to know I learned in Kindergarten". One of the chapters tells the story of Steven Brill a man who, after hearing New York Cab Drivers were all dishonest, decided to look into it. He decided to get in a bunch of cabs, pretend to be an out-of-towner and asks to be driven somewhere really close to see if the cab driver would rip him off. This was the result (from the book)...

“One driver out of thirty-seven cheated him. The rest took him directly to his destination and charged him correctly. Several refused to take him when his destination was only a block or two away, even getting out of their cabs to show him how close he already was. The greatest irony is that several drivers warned him that New York City was full of crooks and to be careful.

You will continue to read stories of crookedness and corruption-of policemen who lie and steal, doctors who reap where they do not sew, politicians on the take. Don’t be misled. They are news because they are exceptions. The evidence suggests that you can trust a lot more people than you think."

That, to me, says it all. When the bad people stop getting attention I’ll worry. Until then I continue to believe the loud mouth trolls are just an exception to the rule.

On the Internet side, I understand why you might think there are more bad people on the Internet but I’d point this out: The Internet is a place where the loudest person in the crowd can push out in front of it. There’s no referee so sometimes it’s the trolls who look like their dominating the conversation. But if you read a site like HN you’ll see there are far more well-intentioned comments than there is trolling. The trolling is just what sticks in your mind.

You more or less just described 4chan.org, which does in fact get an absurd amount of traffic.

I think it balances it out. People have a need to express their 'dark side' because so much of what we would normally say or do is suppressed by fear of what others would think of us or other types of social mores. Often we learn where the lines are by crossing them and either feeling shitty about it or being reprimanded for it. But if things were opposite, if we lived in a world of dark ugliness, there'd be the same longing for an escape into beauty, peace, and politeness.

Have you read about T-Shirt Hell shutting down? ( http://bit.ly/YkX4 ) Is it unfortunate that they existed to begin with, or unfortunate that they're closing? Some of us may have strong opinions about it, but I'd be most of us would say that as a whole, most people would find the issue ambiguous... that the lines aren't clear.

In some cases, the lines are clear. Spitting on someone is unacceptable. Maliciously harming someone is unacceptable. But in other cases, let's say humor, the lines aren't clear at all. And it's because we, as a society, don't make our opinions heard, clearly or even through signals like frown power ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Frown%20Power ). We need to tell people doing something offensive that it's offensive, and why. We need to tell people telling someone that things that _aren't_ offensive are offensive are wrong, and why.

Otherwise, people are going to continue to repress things they'd like to do/say, and it will continue to be spewed forth in concentrated venom.

IMO, the core problem is that our whole concept of humour revolves around negativity.

I wouldn't say it -revolves- around it, but the current popularity of things like FAIL are a good example of your theory.

Good point. It would be pretty hard to imagine a popular line of jokes based around images of things succeeding.

But that's just an unusually pure case of a general rule, I think. Maybe I'm unwittingly biased but almost all the jokes I hear are some kind of inventive invitation to laugh at someone else's expense. That just seems to be a general rule of comedy, and comedy is an extremely powerful force behind troll-like behaviour.

Bad Things Happening To Other People (Especially Celebrities) is just such a potent force for entertainment across all categories that I think we can just assume it's here to stay and try to design either for or around it.

Actually, humor often involves pain - negativity is merely one form. The stooges combine negativity and pain.

> Comments?

That is the issue. Giving users a public voice on your site is what kills everything in the end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com