But not it made me wonder, how a positive enforcing behavior is only allowing down vote until you reach a threshold. It makes you engage and understand the community better before making your judgment.
It is also a way to manipulate HN to allow those with similar views to prosper and reinforce those same ideas. Those who don't agree have less power...
Yes, preservation of the “house style” is an explicit goal of HN’s design and moderation. Preventing newcomers from “democratically” hijacking the forum and turning it into something else is something it’s explicitly built to thwart.
I find that true technical commentary is often less appreciated than superficial technical statements.
Using only myself as an example:
* I write a comment about databases and data science that comprises hard-won insights borne out of years of experience and mistakes -> {0, 1, 2} upvotes.
* I write a throwaway comment about IBM PC-DOS -> many more upvotes (>10).
I'm not complaining. I think HN merely conforms to the broader pattern of the world.
It does have one downside: very often, soundbite comments that are naive or wrong get upvoted a lot. [0]
It takes a while in the beginning, then you learn what works and what doesn't, which thankfully aligns fairly well with the community values as I see them. Here's a distillation of how I see them:
* Comment when you have something to contribute. The contribution can be small, even just adding your own experience. A "me too" comment will likely get downvoted. A "Me too. I often experience/feel this when..." will likely be left neutral or upvoted, depending on topic and content.
* Assume the other party in a discussion or argument is acting in good faith. Try to look for alternate interpretations for offensive or upsetting comments, and ask, if at all ambiguous. Even if it's clear the opinion is at odds with your own, don't condemn someone outright, ask why (and try to do so in a way that doesn't sound like you're setting them up).
* Tangents are okay. Responding to a particular comment but addressing the conversation is okay. Try to make it obvious when you are not addressing the person you replied to specifically. Context matters, especially for those that see the reply, and it's easy for them to assume it's supposed to be meant as a rebuttal to them when they've been seeing lots of rebuttals.
I believe the top comment in an high voted thread can get 100+ points but winning the thread is extremely difficult. In almost 6y I only was able to make it 3 or 4 times. The quality is really high and it's amazing how there is always somebody in a better position to comment it.
For all the complaints about the hivemind, I see a broader range of opinions here than anywhere else. Perhaps the reason for complaints is that the visibly broad range of opinions creates an expectation that any reasonable opinion will be tolerated, when in fact some reasonable opinions will be suppressed by the community. In such a generally open context, this suppression seems particularly unjust.
In general true, but there are a certain few “lightning rod” topics for which there is only a limited set of HNCorrect opinions. No matter how well written/sourced/argued your comment is, if it goes against the group belief it will be buried. I just avoid these topics altogether now—it’s not worth the time spent writing.
On the other hand, in general I don’t care about the occasional wave of downvotes. They’re fake internet points—-no reason to tie your HN karma to any measure of self worth. Literally anything can and will get down-votes here. Hell, just yesterday I wrote a long-ish story about some ethical issues I encountered as an engineer. No arguments or judgment passing or controversial stands—just a “here’s a little snippet of my career” and it got a couple downvotes. No need to sweat them. The advice to not complain in-thread about downvotes and not attack/question your downvoters is good advice. It’s pointless because everything, including uncontroversial comments, high quality comments, correct, incorrect—-they all get a few downs.
> In general true, but there are a certain few “lightning rod” topics for which there is only a limited set of HNCorrect opinions. No matter how well written/sourced/argued your comment is, if it goes against the group belief it will be buried. I just avoid these topics altogether now—it’s not worth the time spent writing.
Sound advice. It's easy to collect some downvotes by posting about anything people feel passionate about -- there's always going to be somebody who downvotes out of dislike for your opinion. Also, I believe criticizing certain national governments attracts an outsized share of downvotes / flags.
That or any google proguct. They seem to have the forum locked down tight. Look at the posts that rise after a while in any AMP, Gmail, or Talk thread. Its a clear shift when workers come online. I often wonder how many people are employed to influence and steer technical discussion on sites like this.
Certain topics are predictsbly for/against on HN. Nuclear power is one such topic where for example arguments against Thorium reactors gets HN voters up in arms and prompt downvotes.
> No matter how well written/sourced/argued your comment is, if it goes against the group belief it will be buried.
These exist, but I'm not sure it's as cut and dry as that. Sometimes arguments you've seen, or made yourself, that were open ended and/or asking for discussion get downvoted, but sometimes it's just a week later and they don't. I think a lot of it has to do with the context people see it in, their own state of mind, and whether someone happened to take up reasoned discussion on the topic before downvotes started accumulating.
Put another way, I think there's a lot of people that see someone looking to talk about a topic and immediately assume they are looking for an opening to express their outside views rather than explore the topic (which is not fair to assume, IMO). Seeing people discuss that topic rationally stalls or negates that knee-jerk reaction.
In other words, it's a crap shoot (but there are strategies for broaching these subjects that work better than others).
Sure, it does act as a stabilizer, but IMO it affects discussion style much more than opinions expressed. Which is, to me, is a good thing.
Rudeness and pointless ramblings get downvoted quickly, which is likely a model learned quickly by newcomers. Arguing an unpopular view is unlikely to get beaten hard -- I do not recall ever getting more than -3 or so on a comment (but maybe I am just a conformist).
it's interesting to note that that's exactly the kind of position you might have if your opinions are just not that great.
the whole system is rigged and it's just not appreciating your awesomeness. maybe you're seeing a pattern that's not there? might it be your opinions that are flawed? or maybe your communication skills or style are left wanting? i don't know but those things are certainly possibilities too.
you didn't actually make an argument about what you think the "similar views" are, how the mechanism works, who's involved, or anything worthy of consideration and discussion.
might that be representative of the problem right there?
It's called groupthink. And I've heard many people outside the SV scene complain precisely about SV groupthink issues.
They can be good ideas, bad ideas, horrendous ideas... Regardless, if SV thinks its good, then it passes muster here.
I've said quite a few things that have either scored low or negative, even if they sane and cogent and direct. They just challenge the precepts that are held holy in the 'Valley.
Do you folks have any anonymized demographics data? I’d love to see it over time in particular, since I’m guessing early on it was much more SV. When I travel and am in a vastly different time zone (like say to Europe or Asia), I notice the active participants on HN are fairly different. Is 10% by viewership, accounts, activity, all of the above?
I was just looking at this. 5% of "users" (it depends how you define a user who isn't logged in) last month were in SV. A third were in the US, a third in Europe, 8% in Canada/Australia/NZ, 6% in India, 3% in China.
That is the distribution of everyone who hit the site last month at all, regardless of how much they used it. If we weight the numbers by the number of days they used HN, then US has 44%, Europe 33%, Can/Aus/NZ 8%, India 3%, China 2%. And Silicon Valley is 8%. That's surprisingly low, given how many people assume that HN == SV.
In my opinion, it creates an echo chamber where in order to be a "full member" of the community you have to already espouse views the community supports. It is a big reason why I don't participate much.
I certainly think it's possible to clear 500 karma by playing to the echo chamber, but I don't remember having had much difficulty doing getting 500 and most of my comments have either been technical or about niche policy-ish stuff like urban planning or energy. I think my personal views on particularly echo-chamber-y things are probably at least somewhat different from any normative HN values that may exist, and that hasn't really been a barrier.
I espouse a lot of views that the community does not support. I am also the first woman to make the leaderboard (under a different handle -- my retired handle has 25k karma).
I don't think it works exactly the way you think it does.
How do you know you were the first woman to do so? This is a psuedo anonymous internet forum where people aren't required to state their gender or even their real names.
I will add that being the first woman on the leaderboard is not essential to the point that you can get a lot of karma and not be part of the echo chamber. But inevitably that is the detail that gets focused on, as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my actual point.
My other handle has 25k karma. This one has over 3k. I don't in any way whatsoever participate in an echo chamber.
> I will add that being the first woman on the leaderboard is not essential to the point that you can get a lot of karma and not be part of the echo chamber. But inevitably that is the detail that gets focused on,
If it's not essential, and you don't want people to focus on it, why did you bring it up? It was the only interesting part of your comment (to me). I don't really care if HN is an echo chamber or not.
> as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my actual point.
I actually dont care if you were or were not the first woman or if it was someone else, I was just curious about how you knew on an anonymous forum. But go ahead, be mad about it.
Your blog post is interesting, so thanks for linking that.
Why do you think "views the community supports" is the only thing that people upvote? I upvote entire threads where people are disagreeing because the whole conversation has value. I also upvote comments that add something new to the conversation. I think you have a naïve sense of participation.
I reached that threshold mostly via submissions, I don't comment that much (but also downvote very rarely). Surely, also submissions may add to the echo chamber, especially if they hit a nerve.
One reason for me to stay here is the diversity (and civility) of the comments, I don't think it's too bad. Another favourite read of mine is Arstechnica, but the comments there don't reach the quality of the comments on HN, imho.
I don't participate much because unlike, say, reddit, HN seems much more focused on delivering people to other destinations. That might just be my perception, but I think reddit has much more sophisticated community features, where as comments have always felt like an add-on for HN
That's so different from my experience. I often read the comments on HN before the linked article. I generally find reddit comments, even in subs dedicated to topics I care about, to be garbage. In contrast, I learn a lot from reading HN's comments.
Then again, if you feel that you need to be able to downvote people in order to "participate", maybe it's good that you don't have a downvote button yet ;-)
I've been slowly creeping towards downvoting for the better part of 2 years as I comment very infrequently. I imagine it'll be anticlimactic once I get there, but it's relatively exciting to be so close—it's the last frontier of Hacker News-ing.
We'll probably get rid of that list or at least change it to show different kinds of leaders. I've been saying that for years, but like an alligator, we lunge eventually.
It seemed to take forever, and I was counting the numbers when I was at like 490, but now the downvote buttons are there, I find it's very rare that I get a chance to wield them in anger.
HA! That made me think of what might be an interesting feature on a forum, if the parent gets downvoted, all the children do as well. Might prevent feeding trolls or expanding off-topic conversations.
Often I feel it's not worth replying to obviously wrong stuff because it'll just get downvoted so low that nobody's likely to see my eloquent and carefully-worded rebuttal anyway.
Ahh that's why I don't see a downvote button :) - I thought it was a feature reserved to super privileged users