I think these criticisms aren't just relevant to HN, they apply to all social media and online conversation. Even (group) email can become quite toxic if people don't convey their emotion well.
I have been on HN for 15 years, I have spent far too much time on this site. Eventually you learn which topics will be "toxic" and avoid them (if you want to). To some extent it just maturity (or lack there of) but I actually think HN is far less toxic outside of some specific topics than other sites.
The topics that are liable to become flame wars change over time, currently it seems to be anything "Crypto" or "Online Advertising" as people have very strong feelings on both sides. I'm certainly still guilty of getting drawn in at times, especially when I feel I have a horse in the race. There is always insightful comments in these threads too.
Fortunately HN is designed to detect topics that are getting out of hand (far more comments than up votes) and they drop of the homepage quickly massively reducing the exposure. Exactly where this thread is already going.
I think the best decision HN made was not breaking the site into categories or "Sub-HNs" where specific toxic topics can grow and mutate, everything is forced though the front page ensuring a level of self moderation.
After 15 years on the site I have no intention of leaving it.
I'm a very sparing user of social media, but after work I do love to play games. I play games with people I know IRL as well as a litany of people I've never met - true to my old 90's and 00's gamer days. Now, there's Discord.
I was pretty skeptical the first time people implored me to join a Discord server, but I've found some communities are very dope. I've discovered that managing peoples behavior online is like trying to herd sheep in a straight line. The flock always goes forward, that much is constant. There are sheep on the left and on the right side of the herd that push the herd onto a new trajectory, a lot of the time I don't think they even know what they're doing, but if you take a step back you can watch it occur in real-time. A leader, who likely doesn't know they're a leader, starts acting in a certain way, which causes the shift. Then another leader clashes with that leader by proxy, which is what I describe as the other side of the herd. These bounding behaviors almost never keep the flock constrained, they cause the flock to split.
These leaders are disposable though. They're placeholders for culture, language, collections of experience, values, etc that people identify with. It takes having conversations with troublemakers and making their effects known in plain language. Some people will get it, moderate their behavior despite their culture, language, collections of experience, values etc and some won't. Those who won't will either leave on their own or get banned.
Health, specifically diet/exercise, are also on this list of topics that typically get pretty toxic in my mind. Where the volume of voice outweigh the experts in the crowd.
> I think these criticisms aren't just relevant to HN, they apply to all social media and online conversation.
I believe the reason is that epistemology (generally: theory of knowledge, seeking/determining what is actually(!) True) is not just hard, but it goes counter to the natural workings of the human mind. If the topic of a thread is a psychology paper dealing with human perception, bias, this sort of thing (an abstract discussion of the phenomenon), few people have difficulty realizing and acknowledging that this is a fundamental problem, in/with reality. However, if the topic of discussion is an object level matter, particularly culture war issues (but even technical ones, as the author notes), the mind seems to run in a different mode - gone[1] is the knowledge that the mind is subject to imperfect thinking, replaced by ~"perception is reality". And, one's intuition might suggest that intelligent people would be less prone to this problem, but substantial evidence[2] suggests that this is not only not necessarily true, but that intelligence exacerbates the problem (if one is usually more often correct than others, it is perfectly reasonable that their default confidence level in being correct would increase).
What I think is also interesting: it seems to me that this one fundamental idea could be one of the main root cause problems with human interaction on the internet (or, in general, really), a topic most people seem to be very interested in - but oddly, these same people almost without exception (in my experience) have zero (or less than) interest in identifying plausible root causes of the problem and contemplating/brainstorming solutions - the exact opposite of what one's intuition might predict. I have yet to encounter a single human being that is even marginally seriously interested in this idea (and many(!) who recoil from it), and I have talked to hundreds of people about it, often in meetups and other places where the general problem with people getting along, fake news, etc is literally the sole topic of conversation.
I am not optimistic that humanity can solve a problem that their mind does not grant them access to (assuming my theory has some truth to it).
There are four ways in which people disagree. First is just miscommunication which is easily clarified. Second is working from a different set of facts. Third is same facts, different interpretation. Lastly is same facts, same interpretation, different principles. Discourse online straddles the four, with an unhealthy amount of ego and stubborness thrown in for good (bad) measure. Without a good way to get people on the same page first, aka people don't even read the linked article before commenting (tbc, guilty of that myself), there's zero real hope of getting people interested in epistemology and why we get it so wrong. And who could blame them? Examining why you believe something central to your identity threatens it and is very uncomfortable, and most people simply aren't here for that.
This is the tamest and most well moderated forum I've experienced on the internet. For goodness sakes, I made a snarky comment about an NFT marketplace and was firmly warned about it by dang.
I'd say tildes.net, most project-specific forums (Discourse instances for FLOSS projects come to mind: Fedora, Let's Encrypt, F-Droid, Signal, and others), several mailing lists, and perhaps even lobste.rs are far more constructive.
I've noticed that HN is just like Reddit, Lemmy, and other up/down-vote based forums for threaded discussions in that it incentivizes one extremely predictable pattern:
Commenters have a first impression of what an article will say before they finish reading it, or before they read it at all. They take this anticipation of what the article will say, form an opinion about it, and search for comments that validate that opinion. These comments get upvoted.
Because of this, commenters have an incentive to not just validate common opinions about an article, but opinions about what an article may be about so they don't have to risk considering its content/views.
This phenomenon applies to the comments too, to a lesser degree. There's a recursive effect going on that promotes bikeshedding.
While it shares this characteristic, at leas the discussion quality is better than mainstream social media (FB, Reddit, etc); however, that's not even worth mentioning IMO because comparing a forum's quality to them would be an insult to said forum.
Several far less active forums like littr, subreply, gurlic, and tilde.news are far less toxic so some of this is probably most apparent with some popularity.
I will say that the moderation seems excellent, though.
It's the most well moderated free forum. I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better, but that makes sense because people don't like toxicity in something they have paid for.
As is so often the case on Internet forums, I’ve erred and let myself get heated here from time to time. Of the thankfully rare interactions I’ve had with the moderation team, it’s always been a positive experience. I never felt like they were trying to punish, but rather to cultivate an intellectually rich forum where they want me to participate fruitfully.
It’s a pretty thankless job, so I’ll take this opportunity to say thanks mod team, in particular thanks dang!
I was gonna say exactly this… It's absolutely true. Compared against almost every other comments/discussion forum I've tried/used, this is by far one of the overall generally sanest (free and open-ish) places on the modern web to participate in discussions.
It's also one of the most dog-whistled racist communities I've been on. Unfortunately, calling out that behavior gets you targeted as a SJW, or something else.
But yeah, on some posts, I get really uncomfortable on HN.
> The topics that are liable to become flame wars change over time, currently it seems to be anything "Crypto" or "Online Advertising" as people have very strong feelings on both sides
Oh yes, I've kept a very high opinion of this forum and its commenters once I skipped right past the daily 250+ comment posts about COVID-19 that have plagued us for 2 years. When it comes to tech, this place is an absolute treasure, but there's few things as odious as tech nerds improvising themselves as politicians, epidemiologists, microbiologists, logistics experts and activists just because they know how to use Google and follow some people on Twitter.
The bitcoin craze wasn't even close to being as bad as the past two years.
odious as tech nerds improvising themselves as politicians, epidemiologists, microbiologists, logistics experts and activists just because they know how to use Google and follow some people on Twitter.
What is wrong with people do their own research, seeking their own info? Health experts, the mainstream media, and politicians do not have a monopoly on truth, and were wrong any times about Covid.
"My dad told me that he wants to dabble in programming, but MySQL isn’t compatible with his laptop. My response? "Yeah there’s no way that’s true. MySQL will work on anything." Instead of taking a look at this laptop and working on the problem with him, I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing (basically)."
I catch myself doing this, without realizing it far too often. It's good to catch yourself and try to change.
It's the type of response a younger me would have said before I found out how wrong I can be even on subjects I think I know a lot about. My response now to such a question would be "That's weird, mySQL should work on all laptops. Let me take a look." From that point on I'm expecting it to be an error the person didn't understand, but I'm open to the idea that it might be a failure of their install script due to an odd configuration of the laptop, or even a symptom of another problem somewhere else, such as limited disk space, incorrectly installed drivers, or even a hardware issue.
It's entirely possible that it's correct depending on the specifics.
Say for example one is trying to install MySQL 8.0 on a laptop with Catalina, which is still supported by Apple and getting security updates. This is actually unsupported and won't work. A somewhat unlikely situation but definitely not impossible.
Exactly what the crafty older person wanted. Get you to do the work. "It doesn't work on my computer" or some other claim of trouble or ignorance is an easy way to trick a smart energetic young person to do something for you.
Young smart people don't like to say "I don't know how" or "I can't get it to work." An older person will say that without hesitation if it will prompt someone else to do something that he doesn't want to do himself.
The problem in those examples is not rejecting the premise, it's doing so in a dismissive, arrogant way.
I've had customers, friends, and family members tell me time and time again that they can't do some common, everyday thing on their computers because it's "not compatible", or it "won't let them", or it "doesn't work". If they're wrong, I show them where they're wrong, what they need to do to fix the problem and avoid similar ones in the future. No need to be dismissive, or berate them for not knowing something. It ends up being a nice "today I learned" situation for them, and we all win.
Honestly, the world would be a much more amazing place if it would be taught in schools that just "it doesn't work" does not convey any meaningful information. I don't mean this as complaint, just saying that it's so extremely common and so simple it can be a part of curriculum or a social campaign that has potential to save a lot of human-hours (and lots of frustration) just by spreading a simple meme/idea.
Also, I can't say I perceive the dismissal from the quote alone. Those two short sentences feel like a very brief excerpt from beginning of a conversation so it's hard to gauge, but I feel that it's an exclamation of surprise that's non-committal and lacking an explicit offer to proceed with details, rather than dismissive (or worse). Circumstances, tone, body language, relationship and other things may make it vary, of course. Can't say it's arrogant either, "no way, it must work" is a legit exclamation that doesn't imply incompetence (unless, again, tone etc).
I'd say it's just passive, not taking any initiative to troubleshoot and communicating just the assurance that the problem must be solvable, then bouncing back to the inquirer. In my understanding, it's more of a lazy/not being in the mood, not dismissive (and I'd have a really hard time trying to call it "toxic").
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was to maintain the capacity to be surprised. And they didn't mean maintaining the capacity to be surprised by someone exceeding expectations, but rather being surprised that the facts are not at all what I currently think they are.
I've noticed myself doing this in the last year or so. I've done it all my life, I'm sure, but it's the first time I really recognized the behavior. I wish I had caught it sooner because it definitely comes across as rude and a bit condescending.
I think for so many of us, we desire to be correct, or to correct people or the world, so much that we miss out on the true "signal" someone is sending us with their message. In this case, the author's dad wanting help in getting into programming.
I don't know if it's 100% true, but for me it feels like correcting people is partly wanting validation that I'm smart or know things. It's sort of performative, and can be very selfish.
This is typical programmer behavior. We end up in tech because we have more interest in thing than people. Empathy is not as developed as technical aptitude. I don't think it's a result of an online forum. Perhaps gathering with like minded people doesn't help but the problem goes deeper. Ultimately this sort of issue is about personal development. I say this as someone with plenty to work on myself.
Use whatever strategies you think will result in the personal growth you desire. One strategy might be to avoid HN. However HN is not the problem you are. Taking responsibility will help you grow. You're influenced by your environment but you're responsible for how you respond to your environment. You always have a choice.
I don't even understand the premise. My answer would be "There's no chance it's not compatible with your laptop. Tell me what happened."
If I wasn't ready to argue, I wouldn't have said anything. Arguing in this case means to troubleshoot with him. Sometimes I think that other people think the purpose of argument is to hurt people. The purpose of argument (for me) is to make the people who are arguing smarter than they were before the argument. I don't get pleasure out of hurting my father or showing him up - I like my father. If anything, I want to make him feel smarter than he is, and I hope he feels the same about me.
edit: Also, it may turn out this is a weird corner-case and MySQL is somehow incompatible with his laptop. I'm not a MySQL scientist. After finding that out, though, I'm a tiny bit closer to being one.
I think this is the sentiment that they are fighting back on and calling toxic. I tend to agree. I don't want to argue and don't think it is a very good path to learning or improvement. A better alternative IMHO is conversation or joint exploration.
I think the biggest challenge is the format of internet dialog is conducive to argument that it leads people to forget or skip other modes of conversation.
If I asked for help with a problem and someone tried to argue with me, I would think they are toxic and look for help elsewhere. I didn't ask for help because I was looking for a fight.
The Socratic method and debate is good if you want to find the errors in your thinking. But I'm not trying to philosophically debug my thought processes and world view. I just want to fix a damn program.
This. I don't get it either. In my view, the "no way, it must work" is a non-optimal but perfectly valid conversation starter (please explain me why not if I'm wrong). As long as that's not the whole conversation (which would mean there are way worse problems than lack of explicit inquiry in that response) and there's at some sort of follow-up from either party, I don't really see the problem here.
(Disclaimer: I'm explicitly not thinking up circumstances, tone, gestures or anything else not included in that short snippet. Obviously. It's well possible same exact words spoken in different contexts or with different tone or body language may have quite opposite meanings.)
Yes, there are better responses. But it's definitely not a "well, that sucks and you're wrong, go try some more" either.
> I don't get pleasure out of hurting my father or showing him up - I like my father.
Sure but there's way to say something that may hurt someone... even if you don't intend to.
I think it's something that happens more on the web as we forget there's someone on the other side.
> Also, it may turn out this is a weird corner-case and MySQL is somehow incompatible with his laptop.
You started with "There's no chance" though... You may be ready to change your stance, but your first sentence didn't have that possibility. What someone understands by your sentence is that "I am the problem" instead of "there may be a problem".
I don't think OP example was the best to illustrate the issue, but I don't have a better example either, still struggling with that myself too.
I recognize myself in this story, but I wouldn't say that I mean to be mean or dismissive or superior. Usually it's that I fall into the trap of being 'too literal'. We spend all day being very precise about the conditions and cases where we are making changes, amendments, or extending capabilities. It drives me crazy when people won't just get to the point of the story or ask that can be scoped-out if-and-as necessary. I'm not talking about interacting with inexperienced people either, they're otherwise very intelligent and articulate but have a way of speaking that seems all so inefficient or ineffective, often adding lots of emotional embellishments that don't change the problem statement.
Now, I'm not usually as unaware of insensitive as that description may sound, but you may be able to see some truth in the patterns.
[I kind-of feel like I'm on a rant, so I'll add this too. The worst is when engineers at a meeting debate the 'root cause' theorizing all the permutations and possibilities to identify the correct one, taking as long as that takes. Often a simple search through the source-code or log files would have narrowed it down to but a few to easily verify--but they'd rather be playing RCA golf out loud.]
That's a really unhelpful response, because it just seeks to deny what that user has just experienced! A better approach is to say that MySQL just being incompatible with stuff is not something that's supposed to happen, but as part of asking for clarification on how the supposed incompatibility came about (or even simply as offering to look into it, if appropriate), so as to helpfully root-cause and troubleshoot the issue. The basic facts you're relying on are exactly the same, but the underlying attitude could not be more different!
I struggle with understanding this viewpoint. I don't think the son is being harsh or dismissive, in fact it strikes me as utterly guileless. He has a reaction . o O (That can't be right...) and voices it without artifice or manipulation.
On the other hand, the father presumably knows that the son is technically inclined, but dismisses his expertise out of hand. He's struggling, but he doesn't say "I'm struggling getting this to work." The author presumes that the father wants him to help, and I defer to him on that, but the father doesn't ask for help. Instead he stakes out an extreme position (it's incompatible!). In some cases, people do this in an intentionally manipulative way! (See comment in this thread about the timeless technique of confidently stating a wrong answer to goad people into jumping in.)
I don't know the author or his father, so I don't know what their actual intentions or interactions are. Please don't read my comment as impugning them or their motives in any way. But the hypothetical situation as presented does not lead me to the conclusions that I think the author intends readers to reach.
You know, I think that is not toxic, and I would argue it is not smart or dumb ( so to speak ) as the author tries to put it.
It is simply youth and inexperience, or age and wisdom depending on the situation and how you view it.
And that is a problem in online discussion because I dont know people's age. ( And that is going to get drawn into ageism discussions but let's ignore that for now ) If I know you are only 20ish. My first instinct wouldn't be try and correct you it "really" isn't working. It is to convince you to take a look. And give you directions. You cant give people answer to questions or problems they have. They have to figure it out the answer themselves. The experience of real learning.
And online discussions misses a lot of these context. Or at least very hard to do it correctly.
You should, in most cases grown out of it in your 30s, or about 10 years after you start working in the society. And laugh about the stupidity of it in your 40s or 50s.
My biggest concern is somehow there are increasingly number of people, especially in tech ( I have no idea why ) that dont grown out of it.
“Congrats, your first lesson in programming is troubleshooting a MySQL installation”. I would help him logically troubleshoot, and understand how to enjoy* the problem rather than be frustrated by it, but no way would I do it for him. He’ll have many harder problems soon enough. Make it a teachable moment.
* I’m not saying it will always be enjoyable - nothing sucks more than things that should work but don’t when you’re on a schedule, but if it’s your first foray into taking technical “ownership” of your system, ya better learn to be interested in the new problems, understanding the clockworks, and learning to think as the machine does.
Sometimes I wish I were a little more like that. Instead I agonize over wording so I don't sound impolite / stupid and often choose to say nothing, even where my input might be useful. I guess there are worse things.
If people want to collaborate, sure. I play 3 instruments, have stripped multiple cars to the frame, and rebuilt them, grown food, cooked everything. Lets collaborate on something worth connecting over.
Please don’t make me collaborate over copy-pasting a bash script or a one line Docker command.
I find those issues have nothing to do with the complexity of figuring it out but belief in division of labor. A sad, functionally fixed idea of what a person can do.
> "These are typical, HN-esque responses that may get upvotes online, but they hurt personal relationships."
As a regular, I disagree completely. Comments that point out that something is wrong and have the empathy to try to help and identify a solution are much more upvoted that cynical ones that just point out that something is wrong without much caring for the other part.
If you dig up HN only paying attention to potentially toxic comments, you will find them. It doesn't make HN toxic. If you create the habit of reading yesterday's posts, giving them enough time for the best comments to be upvoted and settle at the top, you will see much much less toxicity.
It seems to me that the author is trying to get away from a certain behavior and, in the process, everywhere they look they just fit what they see in that exact behavior. Like when Woody Woodpecker is hungry.
Online, people who don't think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user. Worth remembering whenever Twitter dumbassery drives you to despair."¹²
This covers it all, in my opinion. By the time someone is done posting a six paragraph long analysis that includes sources, a dozen of less pertinent comments will have been posted.
This is what the downvote feature and the flag feature are for.
Ideally, all of us are downvoting cheap humor and unrelated online trends ("first!", etc.)
It's not only an unfortunate happenstance; often it's a deliberate tactic. "Gish gallop" and "flooding the zone" are two of many terms for it. It's trivial for one troll to tie up a dozen good-faith interlocutors with wild claims of their own and demands for proof of others'. It's very hard to devise or enforce rules that would prevent such behavior (far easier to police the reactions), so it's common on practically all forums. For various reasons related to what kinds of people are drawn to computing and what behaviors are rewarded there, it's inevitably going to be even more common here.
Idiocy Saturation: I find this to be very true in many parts of the internet. What keeps me coming back to HN, though, is the outstanding signal-to-noise ratio in the comments that seems like the exception to this rule.
I value the very constructive and thoughtful discussions that happen out here. It can add a lot of value to the originally posted link! (And honestly there are many times where I have felt that the HN discussion was more interesting and profound than the article or blog post, itself...)
An idea for combatting less-thoughtful more-frequent posting: allow at most one post per day. If one gets but one chance to express something, the choice of topic and the care taken in expression may be more thoughtful.
(Or maybe one post and one reply to a response; otherwise, nobody would get a question answered in a timely manner.)
I manage a lot of spaces on Facebook and they recently'ish added a feature like this that moderators can enable on posts.
It limits users to one comment every 5 minutes.
It makes a difference - a big one. Some posts that would not have been approved end up being approved when this feature is enabled.
Instead of wars of words and knee-jerk reactions, people know they can only leave one post every five minutes, so the first few replies take a few minutes to appear. Then, responses to those responses are even more cautious.
People avoid commenting on multiple threads because they can't interact with all of them at once.
For a community as diverse as Hacker News, I've found it to be anything but toxic. The quality of posts is generally high and the people who comment tend to keep things on topic and impersonal. Personal attacks and jabs are not common and people don't just say things for the sake of winning arguments.
Of course, I don't click on every single story - I stick to the things that interest me, which admittedly are narrowing as of late, unlike in my early 20s.
The main thing I've noticed on HN is that having a contrarian mindset is rewarded, even in situations where it doesn't add to the conversation. If you read the two examples the author gave, he's actually being reflexively contrarian, not a know-it-all. In my opinion, that's the "toxic" behavior he's trying to identify, not personal attacks or glib jabs.
> The main thing I've noticed on HN is that having a contrarian mindset is rewarded, even in situations where it doesn't add to the conversation.
Is it really being contrarian, or supporting multiple views in intellectually stimulating discussions?
A few days ago there was a discussion on CORS where some people defended the thesis it made sites less secure, and others stepped in and defended that CORS in fact improved security. Both sides posted their rationales. Arguably neither position was right or wrong. It just depends on perspective.
A glass can be half full and half empty at the same time.
Is anyone being contrarian to point out either interpretation?
It can be a little more toxic than I'd like, but I don't find the issue to be how nice people are about correcting others' mistakes. Instead it's the undercurrent I occasionally see of reactionary politics and weird misinformation. It's not usually horrible, but I tend to stay away when the subject turns to politics or social justice.
Without knowing any statistics on the demographic of HN, I would assume that it really isn't that diverse speaking from a cultural ground, but rather that we have a place that accepts disagreement a lot (or at least doesn't punish you as hard compared to other places). Which can be seen as a form of diverse-ness I guess?
Did HN do any kind of survey to demonstrate their user demographics?
And it is absolutely toxic on certain topics, particularly anything economics related or that challenges capitalism and the "line go up" mentality of the VC culture. If you offer anything that criticizes that at all, you're in for an earful.
Everyone with strong ideological passions thinks that HN is stacked against them ideologically. People routinely say that not only about the community, but about the mods. These perceptions are entirely predictable from the passions of the perceiver.
Who's right? Neither. It's exactly the same perception, just with opposite polarity, because the polarity is coming from inside the person.
More precisely, both are right in the sense that HN generates enough data points for everybody to run into whatever they dislike the most; and both are wrong in that they dramatically overweight that sample, because that's what the brain does with samples like that.
What makes this perception so common on all sides is that HN doesn't partition the site into like-minded siloes (e.g. follow lists or social graphs or subforums). Everyone is in the same big room, so everyone is frequently bumping into views they dislike and normally don't have to deal with as much, at least not in their home base. The irony is that this is actually a step closer both to reality (society is divided on divisive topics) and to genuine tolerance (bearing the presence of what one dislikes). There's more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
The toxicity is there it's just subtle and disguised. Here's a typical one you see on HN that is used directly to escape moderation:
"I find it odd that even when someone tells you the logical outcome you still deny it."
"It's baffles me and is so interesting to see someone behave this way even though it's not logical."
It's this intellectual arrogance where the commenter acts like he's some sort of hyper intelligent savant observing creatures of lower intelligence that is completely toxic. Whenever I see that type of garbage comment, I think dude... the other person just disagrees with you stop talking about him like he's some animal your observing in a laboratory.
> It's this intellectual arrogance where the commenter acts like he's some sort of hyper intelligent savant observing creatures of lower intelligence that is completely toxic. Whenever I see that type of garbage comment, I think dude... the other person just disagrees with you stop talking about him like he's some animal your observing in a laboratory.
Enlightenment ensues when the meta loop is closed. All criticism winds back on itself, including this comment and the next comment commenting on it...they keep wrestling to get outside or on top of each other.
The singularity of meta-commentary is a deep belly laugh.
I made the same realization in myself, but unfortunately in my 30s rather than my 20s. Engineering, whether software or hardware, is all about thoroughly understanding a problem and dissecting it to the nth degree. The better you are at this, the quicker you notice the problems with an initial, creative idea.
"It's easy to be a critic."
If left unchecked, all that is done is the refinement of a skill that is able to find the potential hurdles/blockers in any problem space.
However, when part of a balanced team this attribute can save time going down dead-end paths. But it requires a yin to the yang - a perpetual optimist that won't take no for an answer.
For those of us that are on the analytical end of the spectrum, it is important to realize that noticing an early issue does not equate to the problem space being a waste of time that is unsolvable.1 Instead, use your super-power for good to accelerate finding the efficienct solution to the problem that some has identified and clearly expressed (which is itself itself a super power; and you may have just found your startup founder).
Well said. It is often better to “learn it” later I think. You may have higher standards for learning and instead really mean integrating and internalizing it.
When someone writes a blog post, in my experience, they are often only expressing an idea or reaction that they will soon leave behind.
You really have to separate your life from comments on hacker news. Did a website really make you decide to be a dismissive jerk to your girlfriend and father? I'm glad you are at least recognizing your behavior and hopefully taking steps to improve.
> You really have to separate your life from comments on hacker news.
Except, that's not how human brain works. You learn whatever you see often. That's why it's considered counterproductive to learn by bad examples. The common brain learns by repetition - it doesn't distinguish if what's being repeated is good or bad.
> Did a website really make you decide to be a dismissive jerk to your girlfriend and father?
You'd be surprised! If you're not influenced by regular behavior you encounter, then lucky you. Most of the rest of us do get influenced by simple things like the people's accents, to how they deal with anger and other emotions (e.g. learning passive aggression from a co-worker).
The point is, that the author is trying to point out Hacker News - a discussion forum - is toxic for having a reflex to give contrarian opinions. Wheras the author is doing it in real life in settings where not both parties agree it is a discussion in the first place. That is the toxic behavior, but he tries to paint HN as being toxic.
Hacker News is the absolute pinnacle of non-toxicity on a site that allows essentially everybody to contribute. If everybody is going to have a voice, somebody is going to be offended by it. If you consider this toxic, you consider message boards in particular and the internet itself in general toxic.
HN definitely has a toxic "shoot it down" mentality when new things are presented. As an example, I recall a post where someone posted a browser-based implementation of some very nice airplane cockpit instruments, and I was not at all surprised when the top comment was about how stupid and dangerous it is to try to implement flight controls in a browser. The controls were intended for training purposes. It's as if the prevailing attitude often starts with "your idea is wrong and stupid and I know better even though the first thought I've ever put into the topic was 30 seconds ago."
I often just shake my head at people's inability to sit back and appreciate what's interesting about something, rather than try to find things that are wrong with it.
Rose colored takes on new technology are not in short supply. What's difficult, is to find well reasoned and thoughtful discussions that pick apart new ideas.
Yes, discussions on HN tend to bend towards the latter, but it's a useful counterbalance to the larger environment around technology.
You're completely right. It's toxic everywhere. BUT just because it's toxic everywhere doesn't make it so you get to call HN the "pinnacle of non-toxicity."
It's like saying the least toxic venom on the planet is the pinnacle of non-toxicity... I mean it's still venom.
It's also worth talking about the toxicity on HN because it follows very specific patterns. It's also essentially a dictatorship. Whatever Dang says goes.
> It's like saying the least toxic venom on the planet is the pinnacle of non-toxicity... I mean it's still venom.
If all you see is toxicity, wherever you look around, then perhaps that warrants some introspection and a review of your personal definition of toxicity. Odds are you're picking way too many false positives.
Yeah, if you want to see how bad it can really get, head on over to slashdot. I used to hang around there in the 90s and 00s, but it started going downhill and I left. Went back recently and wow has that place gone to hell. Just full on flamewars with cursing, vulgarities, and name calling in the comments. That kind of behavior would never fly here.
Humans absent an accountability structure are toxic.
Accountability structures are provided by real in person institutions that have standards. For example, nobody is spurting toxic speech at their fellow churchgoers, because there would be a personal price for that.
The anonymous Internet for better or worse removes much of the skin in the game for commenters, thereby incentivizing toxicity.
Readit News
I have been on HN for 15 years, I have spent far too much time on this site. Eventually you learn which topics will be "toxic" and avoid them (if you want to). To some extent it just maturity (or lack there of) but I actually think HN is far less toxic outside of some specific topics than other sites.
The topics that are liable to become flame wars change over time, currently it seems to be anything "Crypto" or "Online Advertising" as people have very strong feelings on both sides. I'm certainly still guilty of getting drawn in at times, especially when I feel I have a horse in the race. There is always insightful comments in these threads too.
Fortunately HN is designed to detect topics that are getting out of hand (far more comments than up votes) and they drop of the homepage quickly massively reducing the exposure. Exactly where this thread is already going.
I think the best decision HN made was not breaking the site into categories or "Sub-HNs" where specific toxic topics can grow and mutate, everything is forced though the front page ensuring a level of self moderation.
After 15 years on the site I have no intention of leaving it.
I was pretty skeptical the first time people implored me to join a Discord server, but I've found some communities are very dope. I've discovered that managing peoples behavior online is like trying to herd sheep in a straight line. The flock always goes forward, that much is constant. There are sheep on the left and on the right side of the herd that push the herd onto a new trajectory, a lot of the time I don't think they even know what they're doing, but if you take a step back you can watch it occur in real-time. A leader, who likely doesn't know they're a leader, starts acting in a certain way, which causes the shift. Then another leader clashes with that leader by proxy, which is what I describe as the other side of the herd. These bounding behaviors almost never keep the flock constrained, they cause the flock to split.
These leaders are disposable though. They're placeholders for culture, language, collections of experience, values, etc that people identify with. It takes having conversations with troublemakers and making their effects known in plain language. Some people will get it, moderate their behavior despite their culture, language, collections of experience, values etc and some won't. Those who won't will either leave on their own or get banned.
I believe the reason is that epistemology (generally: theory of knowledge, seeking/determining what is actually(!) True) is not just hard, but it goes counter to the natural workings of the human mind. If the topic of a thread is a psychology paper dealing with human perception, bias, this sort of thing (an abstract discussion of the phenomenon), few people have difficulty realizing and acknowledging that this is a fundamental problem, in/with reality. However, if the topic of discussion is an object level matter, particularly culture war issues (but even technical ones, as the author notes), the mind seems to run in a different mode - gone[1] is the knowledge that the mind is subject to imperfect thinking, replaced by ~"perception is reality". And, one's intuition might suggest that intelligent people would be less prone to this problem, but substantial evidence[2] suggests that this is not only not necessarily true, but that intelligence exacerbates the problem (if one is usually more often correct than others, it is perfectly reasonable that their default confidence level in being correct would increase).
What I think is also interesting: it seems to me that this one fundamental idea could be one of the main root cause problems with human interaction on the internet (or, in general, really), a topic most people seem to be very interested in - but oddly, these same people almost without exception (in my experience) have zero (or less than) interest in identifying plausible root causes of the problem and contemplating/brainstorming solutions - the exact opposite of what one's intuition might predict. I have yet to encounter a single human being that is even marginally seriously interested in this idea (and many(!) who recoil from it), and I have talked to hundreds of people about it, often in meetups and other places where the general problem with people getting along, fake news, etc is literally the sole topic of conversation.
I am not optimistic that humanity can solve a problem that their mind does not grant them access to (assuming my theory has some truth to it).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory
[2] A word that causes tremendous discord when humans are discussing object level matters
I'd say tildes.net, most project-specific forums (Discourse instances for FLOSS projects come to mind: Fedora, Let's Encrypt, F-Droid, Signal, and others), several mailing lists, and perhaps even lobste.rs are far more constructive.
I've noticed that HN is just like Reddit, Lemmy, and other up/down-vote based forums for threaded discussions in that it incentivizes one extremely predictable pattern:
Commenters have a first impression of what an article will say before they finish reading it, or before they read it at all. They take this anticipation of what the article will say, form an opinion about it, and search for comments that validate that opinion. These comments get upvoted.
Because of this, commenters have an incentive to not just validate common opinions about an article, but opinions about what an article may be about so they don't have to risk considering its content/views.
This phenomenon applies to the comments too, to a lesser degree. There's a recursive effect going on that promotes bikeshedding.
While it shares this characteristic, at leas the discussion quality is better than mainstream social media (FB, Reddit, etc); however, that's not even worth mentioning IMO because comparing a forum's quality to them would be an insult to said forum.
Several far less active forums like littr, subreply, gurlic, and tilde.news are far less toxic so some of this is probably most apparent with some popularity.
I will say that the moderation seems excellent, though.
It's the most well moderated free forum. I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better, but that makes sense because people don't like toxicity in something they have paid for.
It’s a pretty thankless job, so I’ll take this opportunity to say thanks mod team, in particular thanks dang!
But yeah, on some posts, I get really uncomfortable on HN.
Oh yes, I've kept a very high opinion of this forum and its commenters once I skipped right past the daily 250+ comment posts about COVID-19 that have plagued us for 2 years. When it comes to tech, this place is an absolute treasure, but there's few things as odious as tech nerds improvising themselves as politicians, epidemiologists, microbiologists, logistics experts and activists just because they know how to use Google and follow some people on Twitter.
The bitcoin craze wasn't even close to being as bad as the past two years.
What is wrong with people do their own research, seeking their own info? Health experts, the mainstream media, and politicians do not have a monopoly on truth, and were wrong any times about Covid.
I catch myself doing this, without realizing it far too often. It's good to catch yourself and try to change.
People who know too much about a topic also know they are often wrong.
It's the people in the middle who have unlimited confidence and arrogance.
It's entirely possible that it's correct depending on the specifics. Say for example one is trying to install MySQL 8.0 on a laptop with Catalina, which is still supported by Apple and getting security updates. This is actually unsupported and won't work. A somewhat unlikely situation but definitely not impossible.
https://www.mysql.com/support/supportedplatforms/database.ht...
Exactly what the crafty older person wanted. Get you to do the work. "It doesn't work on my computer" or some other claim of trouble or ignorance is an easy way to trick a smart energetic young person to do something for you.
Young smart people don't like to say "I don't know how" or "I can't get it to work." An older person will say that without hesitation if it will prompt someone else to do something that he doesn't want to do himself.
I've had customers, friends, and family members tell me time and time again that they can't do some common, everyday thing on their computers because it's "not compatible", or it "won't let them", or it "doesn't work". If they're wrong, I show them where they're wrong, what they need to do to fix the problem and avoid similar ones in the future. No need to be dismissive, or berate them for not knowing something. It ends up being a nice "today I learned" situation for them, and we all win.
Also, I can't say I perceive the dismissal from the quote alone. Those two short sentences feel like a very brief excerpt from beginning of a conversation so it's hard to gauge, but I feel that it's an exclamation of surprise that's non-committal and lacking an explicit offer to proceed with details, rather than dismissive (or worse). Circumstances, tone, body language, relationship and other things may make it vary, of course. Can't say it's arrogant either, "no way, it must work" is a legit exclamation that doesn't imply incompetence (unless, again, tone etc).
I'd say it's just passive, not taking any initiative to troubleshoot and communicating just the assurance that the problem must be solvable, then bouncing back to the inquirer. In my understanding, it's more of a lazy/not being in the mood, not dismissive (and I'd have a really hard time trying to call it "toxic").
I think for so many of us, we desire to be correct, or to correct people or the world, so much that we miss out on the true "signal" someone is sending us with their message. In this case, the author's dad wanting help in getting into programming.
I don't know if it's 100% true, but for me it feels like correcting people is partly wanting validation that I'm smart or know things. It's sort of performative, and can be very selfish.
Use whatever strategies you think will result in the personal growth you desire. One strategy might be to avoid HN. However HN is not the problem you are. Taking responsibility will help you grow. You're influenced by your environment but you're responsible for how you respond to your environment. You always have a choice.
If I wasn't ready to argue, I wouldn't have said anything. Arguing in this case means to troubleshoot with him. Sometimes I think that other people think the purpose of argument is to hurt people. The purpose of argument (for me) is to make the people who are arguing smarter than they were before the argument. I don't get pleasure out of hurting my father or showing him up - I like my father. If anything, I want to make him feel smarter than he is, and I hope he feels the same about me.
edit: Also, it may turn out this is a weird corner-case and MySQL is somehow incompatible with his laptop. I'm not a MySQL scientist. After finding that out, though, I'm a tiny bit closer to being one.
I think the biggest challenge is the format of internet dialog is conducive to argument that it leads people to forget or skip other modes of conversation.
If I asked for help with a problem and someone tried to argue with me, I would think they are toxic and look for help elsewhere. I didn't ask for help because I was looking for a fight.
The Socratic method and debate is good if you want to find the errors in your thinking. But I'm not trying to philosophically debug my thought processes and world view. I just want to fix a damn program.
(Disclaimer: I'm explicitly not thinking up circumstances, tone, gestures or anything else not included in that short snippet. Obviously. It's well possible same exact words spoken in different contexts or with different tone or body language may have quite opposite meanings.)
Yes, there are better responses. But it's definitely not a "well, that sucks and you're wrong, go try some more" either.
Sure but there's way to say something that may hurt someone... even if you don't intend to.
I think it's something that happens more on the web as we forget there's someone on the other side.
> Also, it may turn out this is a weird corner-case and MySQL is somehow incompatible with his laptop.
You started with "There's no chance" though... You may be ready to change your stance, but your first sentence didn't have that possibility. What someone understands by your sentence is that "I am the problem" instead of "there may be a problem".
I don't think OP example was the best to illustrate the issue, but I don't have a better example either, still struggling with that myself too.
Now, I'm not usually as unaware of insensitive as that description may sound, but you may be able to see some truth in the patterns.
[I kind-of feel like I'm on a rant, so I'll add this too. The worst is when engineers at a meeting debate the 'root cause' theorizing all the permutations and possibilities to identify the correct one, taking as long as that takes. Often a simple search through the source-code or log files would have narrowed it down to but a few to easily verify--but they'd rather be playing RCA golf out loud.]
On the other hand, the father presumably knows that the son is technically inclined, but dismisses his expertise out of hand. He's struggling, but he doesn't say "I'm struggling getting this to work." The author presumes that the father wants him to help, and I defer to him on that, but the father doesn't ask for help. Instead he stakes out an extreme position (it's incompatible!). In some cases, people do this in an intentionally manipulative way! (See comment in this thread about the timeless technique of confidently stating a wrong answer to goad people into jumping in.)
I don't know the author or his father, so I don't know what their actual intentions or interactions are. Please don't read my comment as impugning them or their motives in any way. But the hypothetical situation as presented does not lead me to the conclusions that I think the author intends readers to reach.
It is simply youth and inexperience, or age and wisdom depending on the situation and how you view it.
And that is a problem in online discussion because I dont know people's age. ( And that is going to get drawn into ageism discussions but let's ignore that for now ) If I know you are only 20ish. My first instinct wouldn't be try and correct you it "really" isn't working. It is to convince you to take a look. And give you directions. You cant give people answer to questions or problems they have. They have to figure it out the answer themselves. The experience of real learning.
And online discussions misses a lot of these context. Or at least very hard to do it correctly.
You should, in most cases grown out of it in your 30s, or about 10 years after you start working in the society. And laugh about the stupidity of it in your 40s or 50s.
My biggest concern is somehow there are increasingly number of people, especially in tech ( I have no idea why ) that dont grown out of it.
* I’m not saying it will always be enjoyable - nothing sucks more than things that should work but don’t when you’re on a schedule, but if it’s your first foray into taking technical “ownership” of your system, ya better learn to be interested in the new problems, understanding the clockworks, and learning to think as the machine does.
Getting it to work is a Google search.
If people want to collaborate, sure. I play 3 instruments, have stripped multiple cars to the frame, and rebuilt them, grown food, cooked everything. Lets collaborate on something worth connecting over.
Please don’t make me collaborate over copy-pasting a bash script or a one line Docker command.
I find those issues have nothing to do with the complexity of figuring it out but belief in division of labor. A sad, functionally fixed idea of what a person can do.
Deleted Comment
As a regular, I disagree completely. Comments that point out that something is wrong and have the empathy to try to help and identify a solution are much more upvoted that cynical ones that just point out that something is wrong without much caring for the other part.
If you dig up HN only paying attention to potentially toxic comments, you will find them. It doesn't make HN toxic. If you create the habit of reading yesterday's posts, giving them enough time for the best comments to be upvoted and settle at the top, you will see much much less toxicity.
It seems to me that the author is trying to get away from a certain behavior and, in the process, everywhere they look they just fit what they see in that exact behavior. Like when Woody Woodpecker is hungry.
(and the entire comment really, to the and including and especially the last sentence)
Uhm... this is the kind of response the blog post was talking about. Kind of funny, your comment, only that it isn't.
Edit: if so, is there any edit you would suggest that I could explain my disagreement without being toxic?
Dead Comment
Online, people who don't think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user. Worth remembering whenever Twitter dumbassery drives you to despair."¹²
This covers it all, in my opinion. By the time someone is done posting a six paragraph long analysis that includes sources, a dozen of less pertinent comments will have been posted.
This is what the downvote feature and the flag feature are for.
Ideally, all of us are downvoting cheap humor and unrelated online trends ("first!", etc.)
¹https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1492256294023143426
²Apologies for the wording, I personally would have avoided using "stupid" and "idiocy"
Anyone know of any website that implements this or something similar?
I think it would be a radically different form of interaction, but I doubt it would catch on.
I value the very constructive and thoughtful discussions that happen out here. It can add a lot of value to the originally posted link! (And honestly there are many times where I have felt that the HN discussion was more interesting and profound than the article or blog post, itself...)
(Or maybe one post and one reply to a response; otherwise, nobody would get a question answered in a timely manner.)
It limits users to one comment every 5 minutes.
It makes a difference - a big one. Some posts that would not have been approved end up being approved when this feature is enabled.
Instead of wars of words and knee-jerk reactions, people know they can only leave one post every five minutes, so the first few replies take a few minutes to appear. Then, responses to those responses are even more cautious.
People avoid commenting on multiple threads because they can't interact with all of them at once.
For a community as diverse as Hacker News, I've found it to be anything but toxic. The quality of posts is generally high and the people who comment tend to keep things on topic and impersonal. Personal attacks and jabs are not common and people don't just say things for the sake of winning arguments.
Of course, I don't click on every single story - I stick to the things that interest me, which admittedly are narrowing as of late, unlike in my early 20s.
Is it really being contrarian, or supporting multiple views in intellectually stimulating discussions?
A few days ago there was a discussion on CORS where some people defended the thesis it made sites less secure, and others stepped in and defended that CORS in fact improved security. Both sides posted their rationales. Arguably neither position was right or wrong. It just depends on perspective.
A glass can be half full and half empty at the same time.
Is anyone being contrarian to point out either interpretation?
And it is absolutely toxic on certain topics, particularly anything economics related or that challenges capitalism and the "line go up" mentality of the VC culture. If you offer anything that criticizes that at all, you're in for an earful.
I just happened to write a long comment about this to a commenter who sees HN in just the opposite way to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30346954.
Who's right? Neither. It's exactly the same perception, just with opposite polarity, because the polarity is coming from inside the person.
More precisely, both are right in the sense that HN generates enough data points for everybody to run into whatever they dislike the most; and both are wrong in that they dramatically overweight that sample, because that's what the brain does with samples like that.
What makes this perception so common on all sides is that HN doesn't partition the site into like-minded siloes (e.g. follow lists or social graphs or subforums). Everyone is in the same big room, so everyone is frequently bumping into views they dislike and normally don't have to deal with as much, at least not in their home base. The irony is that this is actually a step closer both to reality (society is divided on divisive topics) and to genuine tolerance (bearing the presence of what one dislikes). There's more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
"I find it odd that even when someone tells you the logical outcome you still deny it."
"It's baffles me and is so interesting to see someone behave this way even though it's not logical."
It's this intellectual arrogance where the commenter acts like he's some sort of hyper intelligent savant observing creatures of lower intelligence that is completely toxic. Whenever I see that type of garbage comment, I think dude... the other person just disagrees with you stop talking about him like he's some animal your observing in a laboratory.
Enlightenment ensues when the meta loop is closed. All criticism winds back on itself, including this comment and the next comment commenting on it...they keep wrestling to get outside or on top of each other.
The singularity of meta-commentary is a deep belly laugh.
"It's easy to be a critic."
If left unchecked, all that is done is the refinement of a skill that is able to find the potential hurdles/blockers in any problem space.
However, when part of a balanced team this attribute can save time going down dead-end paths. But it requires a yin to the yang - a perpetual optimist that won't take no for an answer.
For those of us that are on the analytical end of the spectrum, it is important to realize that noticing an early issue does not equate to the problem space being a waste of time that is unsolvable.1 Instead, use your super-power for good to accelerate finding the efficienct solution to the problem that some has identified and clearly expressed (which is itself itself a super power; and you may have just found your startup founder).
When someone writes a blog post, in my experience, they are often only expressing an idea or reaction that they will soon leave behind.
Except, that's not how human brain works. You learn whatever you see often. That's why it's considered counterproductive to learn by bad examples. The common brain learns by repetition - it doesn't distinguish if what's being repeated is good or bad.
> Did a website really make you decide to be a dismissive jerk to your girlfriend and father?
You'd be surprised! If you're not influenced by regular behavior you encounter, then lucky you. Most of the rest of us do get influenced by simple things like the people's accents, to how they deal with anger and other emotions (e.g. learning passive aggression from a co-worker).
I often just shake my head at people's inability to sit back and appreciate what's interesting about something, rather than try to find things that are wrong with it.
Yes, discussions on HN tend to bend towards the latter, but it's a useful counterbalance to the larger environment around technology.
It's like saying the least toxic venom on the planet is the pinnacle of non-toxicity... I mean it's still venom.
It's also worth talking about the toxicity on HN because it follows very specific patterns. It's also essentially a dictatorship. Whatever Dang says goes.
If all you see is toxicity, wherever you look around, then perhaps that warrants some introspection and a review of your personal definition of toxicity. Odds are you're picking way too many false positives.
One makes things worse and the other makes things better.
Regardless of whatever they say goes where.
Accountability structures are provided by real in person institutions that have standards. For example, nobody is spurting toxic speech at their fellow churchgoers, because there would be a personal price for that.
The anonymous Internet for better or worse removes much of the skin in the game for commenters, thereby incentivizing toxicity.