When someone posts on forums and social media, IME it's very common that the replies focus on how they can "make OP wrong". They only seem to care about how OP can be interpreted as ignorant or illogical or immoral, rather than insightful or helpful. I am sure I'm as guilty of this as anyone else.
It would be good if we understood this phenomenon better, why we do it and how we can be more balanced in our approach to what others say online.
> They only seem to care about how OP can be interpreted as ignorant or illogical or immoral, rather than insightful or helpful.
This is tied to the societal confusion that wrong is the same as bad. Culturally it's bad to be wrong, so we are made to feel ashamed when we're wrong. Really, we should be grateful because it gives us the chance to learn and grow. Being wrong isn't bad, staying wrong might me.
And then you tie in a societal misperception that some people hold that life is a zero sum game, and you can only get ahead by tearing someone else down, and you get the modern internet.
That’s a very good point. Being wrong is bad, changing your mind is bad, so people stick to something they know is probably wrong but changing and admitting that is even worse.
Agreed. I also think a lot of people don't know the difference between knowing something to be true and believing it to be true. I suspect most of us spend quite a few years in this space. It takes a commitment to epistemic honesty and self awareness to get past this. Though, I'm not sure humans can completely shake it.
The problem is that an online comment is not a dialogue.
If I'm conversing with someone in real life, and they say something I strongly disagree with, I can disagree, and we can discuss and perhaps they tell me that I misunderstood them, or they articulated themselves incorrectly, or we are proceeding from different assumptions, etc. I'm reading something online, and I reach a sentence that I strongly disagree with, I essentially have to stop reading at that point, because from that point on I have diverged from being in alignment with the perspective of the author. And there's no back-and-forth to be had, so I need to state my point as clearly as possible - otherwise someone will just do the same thing back to me.
I dunno, I kind of feel like I'm probably the type of person that's being described here, but I don't really intend to "make OP wrong". I just don't see any other option other than to state my disagreement as plainly as possible, so other people can pick it apart.
> The problem is that an online comment is not a dialogue.
I agree, but I think it has more to do with how online comments are presented. Start with that word, comments. The very word suggests a response rather than a dialogue.
Or look at it a different way, look at it from the perspective of how content is presented online. Have you ever noticed how the host of some YouTube videos invite people to comment with a prompt, such as soliciting information? It is meant to encourage positive conversations. Unfortunately, this is relatively rare with written content. People who have positive things to say may say those things, but negative comments are usually going to win out because the people who make those comments feel that it has to be said. Of course, you are going to have extremes on either side. A community of disciplined readers may keep things positive against all odds and a community of trolls are going to troll, but the lack of a prompt to encourage dialogue is simply gambling on the outcome.
On the other hand, most people double down even when they've been thoroughly corrected. I find that behavior even worse, somehow, than the typical, curt "make OP wrong" response.
That's because finding out the mistakes in OP is one of the biggest benefits of the public comment section. Let's say I read a post about how NEW-TECH is so much better that the current state of the art. I may now be convinced to try it, but how do I know what's written in OP is not omitting serious downsides? That's where the HN (and other fora) comes in: read the comments and see if there are any problems with it.
And according to the golden rule, this means I should also focus on negative comments. If someone told me an important NEW-TECH-1 downside in the past, and I see NEW-TECH-2 and I know its downside (maybe because I had to try it at work, maybe because I am an expert in the area), then I better hop in and post that.
Positive experiences are also useful, but they feel redundant: after all, if OP is positive about NEW-TECH, it likely already mentions all the good things already.
(note that "OP" is original post, not original poster. Arguing against people on internet is almost always a bad idea. Arguing against specific posts is much better.)
The thing is, if I'm looking for how something is wrong, I'm looking for substantive criticism. If someone says something like "yeah okay great system design but only BILLIONAIRES are going to be using this so late stage capitalism <insert rant on inequality here>" then that's not really substantive it's more of a rant by the author disguised as criticism. When a culture of criticism and negativity sets in you get a lot more of these rant-forms of tangential criticism than substantive criticism because it's much easier to write unsubstantive criticism than substantive criticism. Couple this with a tendency for folks to comment on titles rather than articles and you can get a ton of negativity slop all written in less time than it takes to read the article.
It's a fine line. A culture too positive and you get shills and "+1 that looks great" repeated endlessly. A culture too negative and you get tangential rants disguised as criticism.
The focus is not really on making some nebulous "OP" wrong, as if anyone thinks about anything but themselves. The focus is compelling the software to give a result in response. The more obtuse a comment is, the more likely the algorithm will deliver.
> why we do it
Because there is no value in writing a comment that doesn't offer a result. You'd write in your private journal instead if that is what you were looking for. Different tools for different jobs.
> how we can be more balanced in our approach to what others say online.
No need to try and make your hammer a screwdriver when you can use an actual screwdriver just as easily instead. That experience is found in not being online and going outside to talk to people rather than software instead. Use the right tool for the job, as they say.
Part of it is because people who simply agree don’t have anything to say.
Comments like “^ This”, are generally frowned on, because they don’t contribute knowledge to the discussion and we have votes to show agreement. Constructive criticism does. I think this is a good thing, on forums like HN I prefer constructive criticism over unconstructive praise.
However, it doesn’t explain unconstructive criticism (“how OP can be interpreted as ignorant or illogical or immoral”). Maybe people don’t know how to criticize gently and helpfully*, or being rude correlates more with expressing your opinion.
* My advice would be: make objective points and focus on the content, don’t make subjective points or attack the commenter.
It seems implied here that the main things that happen online are unconstructive praise and constructive or unconstructive criticism? So I wonder what's going on with the fourth possibility, constructive feedback that is neutral-to-positive. Why does that box go unmentioned? Are we somehow especially bad at, or uninterested in, doing stuff that fits in this category?
Most content is promoting a product or someone's personal brand, or trying to get you the reader to do something. Even if the information in the post is true, it is much less likely that you should take the action that is implied (buy the thing, subscribe to the blog, join the cause). In a way almost everything is metaphorically wrong because our time is a scarce resource. People like to point out things that are wrong.
Conversly, the best way to get help fast is to state something wrong and wait for someone to correct you. Only asking takes more time to get an answer.
Probably because helpful people will be driven away when they open a thread and see contrarian attitudes. But contrarians that open a thread and see helpful attitudes will just be contrarian towards both OP and the helpful people.
So yes, there may be effects in play like zero-sum thinking, anonymity, ego, obstinacy, or self-selection for strong opinions or real-life jerks.
But it almost doesn't matter whether contrarian attitudes really are "very common". Absent a force that mitigates this unbalanced outcome matrix, it's almost an asymptotic statistical certainty that any Internet thread with enough participants will have enough contrarians in it that the entire thread (and the dominant strategy for anyone who wants to participate in the thread) devolves towards contrarianism.
Nowhere is this urge (and the reward for it) stronger than HN. In the majority of comment sections, the top comment is one that pounces on a few words from the posted article, however tangential or self-serving.
I definitely agree it happens more than ideal on HN as far as I've seen.
However, HN is also one of the few places where it's not uncommon for me to see people push back on it. And often comments that "pounce on a few words" are offering valid criticism on only that part IMO, while still accepting the larger work that's been posted.
This reminds me of one of my favourite exchanges in a detective story:
'Dear me!' said Miss de Vine, 'who is that very uninspired young woman? She seems very much annoyed with my review of Mr. Winterlake's book on Essex. She seems to think I ought to have torn the poor man to pieces because of a trifling error of a few months made in dealing, quite incidentally, with the early history of the Bacon family. She attaches no importance to the fact that the book is the most illuminating and scholarly handling to date of the interactions of two most enigmatic characters.'
'Bacon family history is her subject,' said Miss Lydgate, 'so I've no doubt she feels strongly about it.'
'It's a great mistake to see one's own subject out of proportion to its background. The error should be corrected, of course; I did correct it--in a private letter to the author, which is the proper medium for trifling corrections. But the man has, I feel sure, got hold of the master-key to the situation between those two men, and in so doing he has got hold of a fact of genuine importance.'
-- Gaudy Night, D.L.Sayers (1935)
I think comment sections tend to bring out the "feels strongly" responses where the "private letter" ones would be more appropriate.
While Gaudy Night is a detective story, it's just as much a love letter to Oxford academia (the author being an alumni).
Thanks. I really liked the top voted comment there by edw519 [0]
> I have a simple guideline for real life interactions with others that carries over quite well on-line, "Deal with issues; ignore details."
> It's amazing how well this works in person, especially when trying to get something done. My number one question to another is probably, "Is that an issue or a detail?" We can almost always decide together which it is. Then, if it's an issue, we deal with it, and if it's a detail, we move on to the next issue.
> This has also saved me countless hours and aggravation on-line. If I post something and someone disagrees, I quickly decide whether or not it's really an issue and only engage the other if it is. I realize that this is just a judgment call, but I'd estimate about 90% of on-line disagreements are just details. In these cases, I think it's best to simply move on.
There's a reason complaining that HN is "turning into Reddit" is a "semi-noob illusion as old as the hills."
People show up here expecting a community far more erudite , intellectually and technically deep and separated from popular culture than they find, and when disillusion sets in they interpret this as a degradation of the culture.
Also in a culture that eschews humor and common sentiment the way HN often does (in order to not "be like Reddit") hostility, misanthropy and cynicism become intellectual virtue signals.
HN is always where Reddit was about 3 years ago, the criticism that the comments here are turning into Reddit is true and accurate, it's just that Reddit is a moving target.
I hade a comment section on a blog in the early 2000s. It was a spam nightmare. Never again. I would not have one even with the products that claim to handle that spam for you.
As for the "I thought about this problem for 10s let me tell you all the things wrong with it" - yeah. Engineers do that. I'm constantly pointing it out in relation to LLM coding agents.
Lately I've been stuck in YouTube court cases recommendations. There are live trials and many archives for all sorts of real court cases at every stage. I have grown an appreciation for what a judge does. A judge listens and makes sure all information has been provided before making a judgement/ruling/order. The patience those folks show is significant. I can only imagine how tiring that amount of active listening must be. I have found it personally inspiring and educational.
I have also intentionally not included a comments feature on my blog.
The biggest reason is to avoid extrinsic motivation. What we really miss from the early web is that people were publishing with almost purely intrinsic motivations. Nowadays almost everything on the web is extrinsically motivated, and that is the source of much of the toxicity.
The second reason is a matter of principle. It’s _my_ blog. I publish things here. Why should I feel obliged to allow any rando to publish their screed right next to mine on _my_ website? If you got something to say, go publish on your own web site. If you want, email me. Maybe if I’m feeling generous I will publish a letter to the editor, like a traditional newspaper or magazine.
IMO comments sections were largely a mistake. We would have been better off in a place where we didn’t take for granted that every single article published on the web would have one.
On my personal site, I have a comments section per post but they are on a separate page. So only people who actively look for them will even see them. Bit moot though, anyone who ever ends up contacting me usually writes an email rather than a comment.
I killed Comments on my Blog because of Spam. In its early days (2000s), comments on my blog made my day and hours. I made many friends, got many projects/contracts, along with the occasional threats and trolls. I even got a girlfriend who found it hard to believe that the visitor counter on my website increased non-stop. She commented that I'm cheating. I showed her my Web Analytics. That's how I got a girlfriend (I think 2005-2006).
Off-topic:
Same experience for me. I ended up spending too much time fighting the spam.
The way the spammers got past even hard CAPTCHAs and anti-spam measures convinced me there were humans involved at least some of the time. It made me so sad..
Years ago a friend was telling me about a service that paid 10 cents per hundred solved captchas or something pretty cheap sounding, it worked by having you screenshot the area of your desktop and sending it off to presumably a mechanical turk farm of humans who would report back the answer within some time frame. I'm sure they've only advanced as captchas have gotten more interactive and that bypassing one is still pretty cheap.
There's not much you can do if you become "targeted" but having your own even trivial custom captcha seems to reduce spam a lot. Years ago when I helped moderate a small forum, we added an extra input box for registration that went something like "What holds objects down on the earth, noodles or gravity?" and that entirely eliminated spambot registrations. And approximately no one reads my blog, so again no one's bothering to target explicitly, but I've not had a spam problem in ~15+ years with a combination of the <form>'s action lying about where the POST endpoint is (JS is required for the real one) and a captcha input box of "Please join these two "words" together (without spaces): uoguvwwp and urdugjgy" where the 8 letter 'words' are randomly generated.
This is a restatement of Chesterton's Fence - it's good.
(Here's me leaving an inane comment on the outsourced comment blog, heh.)
However, for low-traffic "blogs" I like having comments enabled, even if many never get shown, because sometimes the ONLY thing you can find on the Internet related to your issue is this one blog, and there's one comment with an updated link that saves all of your bacon and half the farm, too.
I love having comments on my site/blog. I learn so much from some of them. For example, on my hexagon page, someone said there's a connection with "Eisenstein integers". I had never heard of them, and they were fun to learn about. Another example, I don't know "doubled coordinates" that well, so some sections of the page are incomplete. In the comments people have pointed to resources and code that fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Most recently, someone pointed out an inconsistency in something I wrote, and they were right — I have updated the page to resolve it. Before that, someone pointed to an emacs package that might make my life easier, and it looks like it will indeed partially solve the problem I had posted about.
I spend almost zero time moderating, because I've outsourced it to blogger/disqus. I'm not a big fan of disqus but the comments provide so much value to me, and disqus does the moderation so well, that I keep using it for now.
I think of it like giving a talk at a conference, and having questions afterwards. At some conferences, the questions are a waste of time. But at other conferences, the questions are quite valuable. I think comments don't work well on all sites. But they work well on mine.
Readit News
It would be good if we understood this phenomenon better, why we do it and how we can be more balanced in our approach to what others say online.
This is tied to the societal confusion that wrong is the same as bad. Culturally it's bad to be wrong, so we are made to feel ashamed when we're wrong. Really, we should be grateful because it gives us the chance to learn and grow. Being wrong isn't bad, staying wrong might me.
And then you tie in a societal misperception that some people hold that life is a zero sum game, and you can only get ahead by tearing someone else down, and you get the modern internet.
If I'm conversing with someone in real life, and they say something I strongly disagree with, I can disagree, and we can discuss and perhaps they tell me that I misunderstood them, or they articulated themselves incorrectly, or we are proceeding from different assumptions, etc. I'm reading something online, and I reach a sentence that I strongly disagree with, I essentially have to stop reading at that point, because from that point on I have diverged from being in alignment with the perspective of the author. And there's no back-and-forth to be had, so I need to state my point as clearly as possible - otherwise someone will just do the same thing back to me.
I dunno, I kind of feel like I'm probably the type of person that's being described here, but I don't really intend to "make OP wrong". I just don't see any other option other than to state my disagreement as plainly as possible, so other people can pick it apart.
I agree, but I think it has more to do with how online comments are presented. Start with that word, comments. The very word suggests a response rather than a dialogue.
Or look at it a different way, look at it from the perspective of how content is presented online. Have you ever noticed how the host of some YouTube videos invite people to comment with a prompt, such as soliciting information? It is meant to encourage positive conversations. Unfortunately, this is relatively rare with written content. People who have positive things to say may say those things, but negative comments are usually going to win out because the people who make those comments feel that it has to be said. Of course, you are going to have extremes on either side. A community of disciplined readers may keep things positive against all odds and a community of trolls are going to troll, but the lack of a prompt to encourage dialogue is simply gambling on the outcome.
Folks say "I'm making it all about me," and maybe they're right, but it sure beats the usual "drop trou, and drop grogan" style of many folks.
And according to the golden rule, this means I should also focus on negative comments. If someone told me an important NEW-TECH-1 downside in the past, and I see NEW-TECH-2 and I know its downside (maybe because I had to try it at work, maybe because I am an expert in the area), then I better hop in and post that.
Positive experiences are also useful, but they feel redundant: after all, if OP is positive about NEW-TECH, it likely already mentions all the good things already.
(note that "OP" is original post, not original poster. Arguing against people on internet is almost always a bad idea. Arguing against specific posts is much better.)
It's a fine line. A culture too positive and you get shills and "+1 that looks great" repeated endlessly. A culture too negative and you get tangential rants disguised as criticism.
The focus is not really on making some nebulous "OP" wrong, as if anyone thinks about anything but themselves. The focus is compelling the software to give a result in response. The more obtuse a comment is, the more likely the algorithm will deliver.
> why we do it
Because there is no value in writing a comment that doesn't offer a result. You'd write in your private journal instead if that is what you were looking for. Different tools for different jobs.
> how we can be more balanced in our approach to what others say online.
No need to try and make your hammer a screwdriver when you can use an actual screwdriver just as easily instead. That experience is found in not being online and going outside to talk to people rather than software instead. Use the right tool for the job, as they say.
Comments like “^ This”, are generally frowned on, because they don’t contribute knowledge to the discussion and we have votes to show agreement. Constructive criticism does. I think this is a good thing, on forums like HN I prefer constructive criticism over unconstructive praise.
However, it doesn’t explain unconstructive criticism (“how OP can be interpreted as ignorant or illogical or immoral”). Maybe people don’t know how to criticize gently and helpfully*, or being rude correlates more with expressing your opinion.
* My advice would be: make objective points and focus on the content, don’t make subjective points or attack the commenter.
Deleted Comment
I'd call it the "Duty Calls Law" after https://xkcd.com/386/
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
(I'm really hoping you were intentionally setting up the straight line for that joke; if not, sincerest apologies).
But it almost doesn't matter whether contrarian attitudes really are "very common". Absent a force that mitigates this unbalanced outcome matrix, it's almost an asymptotic statistical certainty that any Internet thread with enough participants will have enough contrarians in it that the entire thread (and the dominant strategy for anyone who wants to participate in the thread) devolves towards contrarianism.
However, HN is also one of the few places where it's not uncommon for me to see people push back on it. And often comments that "pounce on a few words" are offering valid criticism on only that part IMO, while still accepting the larger work that's been posted.
'Dear me!' said Miss de Vine, 'who is that very uninspired young woman? She seems very much annoyed with my review of Mr. Winterlake's book on Essex. She seems to think I ought to have torn the poor man to pieces because of a trifling error of a few months made in dealing, quite incidentally, with the early history of the Bacon family. She attaches no importance to the fact that the book is the most illuminating and scholarly handling to date of the interactions of two most enigmatic characters.'
'Bacon family history is her subject,' said Miss Lydgate, 'so I've no doubt she feels strongly about it.'
'It's a great mistake to see one's own subject out of proportion to its background. The error should be corrected, of course; I did correct it--in a private letter to the author, which is the proper medium for trifling corrections. But the man has, I feel sure, got hold of the master-key to the situation between those two men, and in so doing he has got hold of a fact of genuine importance.'
-- Gaudy Night, D.L.Sayers (1935)
I think comment sections tend to bring out the "feels strongly" responses where the "private letter" ones would be more appropriate.
While Gaudy Night is a detective story, it's just as much a love letter to Oxford academia (the author being an alumni).
> I have a simple guideline for real life interactions with others that carries over quite well on-line, "Deal with issues; ignore details." > It's amazing how well this works in person, especially when trying to get something done. My number one question to another is probably, "Is that an issue or a detail?" We can almost always decide together which it is. Then, if it's an issue, we deal with it, and if it's a detail, we move on to the next issue.
> This has also saved me countless hours and aggravation on-line. If I post something and someone disagrees, I quickly decide whether or not it's really an issue and only engage the other if it is. I realize that this is just a judgment call, but I'd estimate about 90% of on-line disagreements are just details. In these cases, I think it's best to simply move on.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057250
People show up here expecting a community far more erudite , intellectually and technically deep and separated from popular culture than they find, and when disillusion sets in they interpret this as a degradation of the culture.
Also in a culture that eschews humor and common sentiment the way HN often does (in order to not "be like Reddit") hostility, misanthropy and cynicism become intellectual virtue signals.
I'm now interested to compare any comments and contributions here with those made last time. Have people's opinions changed?
As for the "I thought about this problem for 10s let me tell you all the things wrong with it" - yeah. Engineers do that. I'm constantly pointing it out in relation to LLM coding agents.
Lately I've been stuck in YouTube court cases recommendations. There are live trials and many archives for all sorts of real court cases at every stage. I have grown an appreciation for what a judge does. A judge listens and makes sure all information has been provided before making a judgement/ruling/order. The patience those folks show is significant. I can only imagine how tiring that amount of active listening must be. I have found it personally inspiring and educational.
https://www.vera.org/news/how-to-be-a-court-watcher-and-why-...
The biggest reason is to avoid extrinsic motivation. What we really miss from the early web is that people were publishing with almost purely intrinsic motivations. Nowadays almost everything on the web is extrinsically motivated, and that is the source of much of the toxicity.
The second reason is a matter of principle. It’s _my_ blog. I publish things here. Why should I feel obliged to allow any rando to publish their screed right next to mine on _my_ website? If you got something to say, go publish on your own web site. If you want, email me. Maybe if I’m feeling generous I will publish a letter to the editor, like a traditional newspaper or magazine.
IMO comments sections were largely a mistake. We would have been better off in a place where we didn’t take for granted that every single article published on the web would have one.
Spam killed it, and let go of blog comments in 2021. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
The way the spammers got past even hard CAPTCHAs and anti-spam measures convinced me there were humans involved at least some of the time. It made me so sad..
There's not much you can do if you become "targeted" but having your own even trivial custom captcha seems to reduce spam a lot. Years ago when I helped moderate a small forum, we added an extra input box for registration that went something like "What holds objects down on the earth, noodles or gravity?" and that entirely eliminated spambot registrations. And approximately no one reads my blog, so again no one's bothering to target explicitly, but I've not had a spam problem in ~15+ years with a combination of the <form>'s action lying about where the POST endpoint is (JS is required for the real one) and a captcha input box of "Please join these two "words" together (without spaces): uoguvwwp and urdugjgy" where the 8 letter 'words' are randomly generated.
(Here's me leaving an inane comment on the outsourced comment blog, heh.)
However, for low-traffic "blogs" I like having comments enabled, even if many never get shown, because sometimes the ONLY thing you can find on the Internet related to your issue is this one blog, and there's one comment with an updated link that saves all of your bacon and half the farm, too.
I spend almost zero time moderating, because I've outsourced it to blogger/disqus. I'm not a big fan of disqus but the comments provide so much value to me, and disqus does the moderation so well, that I keep using it for now.
I think of it like giving a talk at a conference, and having questions afterwards. At some conferences, the questions are a waste of time. But at other conferences, the questions are quite valuable. I think comments don't work well on all sites. But they work well on mine.