Could you please omit swipes from your comments here? You're making a good point and the swipe spoils it.
On HN, we want curious conversation in which people are thoughtful and respectful toward each other. The idea is to collaborate in figuring out the truth together. I know it often seems like other people don't care about that, but a lot of this is an artifact of the medium, because internet comments lack the out-of-band signals that we normally rely on to evaluate other people's intentions.
I agree with most of this even though it comes across as a bit aggressive.
HN is one of the few places I enjoy reading comments because people actually care about communication, and I love reading well-expressed, well-written comments from intelligent people.
HN comments are a statistical distribution. If you make generalizations based on the long tail in the direction you dislike, you won't end up with an accurate picture or feel very good. Everybody does it, though, because we are primed to notice most what we dislike: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... This seems to be an invariant of how human hard-wiring meets the internet.
In general, strive for substantive and constructive comments on HN. If you've got that, a little humor added in can be appreciated. Comments that are submitted only for humor value (which you knew yours was, given your parenthetical addendum) are likely to be less appreciated on HN than on other sites.
Here's a recent thread where this has been discussed:
HN comments shouldn't contain swipes or putdowns, but of course those have a way of sneaking in to one's comments anyhow, so that guideline is asking people to re-read what they've posted and, if they notice a swipe, to edit it out.
I think it's pretty shallow still, even with that, because it's just a generic dismissal. Most readers are already familiar enough with this phenomenon that your comment amounts to a knee-jerk reaction—literally the most obvious thing one might say in the closest generic category. That's a marker of a bad HN comment, because it points to shallower, more generic discussion.
HN gets millions of comments a year. You should expect to find all kinds of junk in any set of that size.
The problem is that people (all of us) are more likely to notice and remember the things they dislike. That basically causes everyone's image of the community to turn into a reflection of their own dislikes—and the more strongly you dislike something, the more vivid the image will be. It's a serious problem and I don't know what to do about it.
> This is one of the few sites that lets you say what you want to say and not think about it further.
Not sure if you'll be back to see this, but... how does this approach to comments align with the ideal of intellectual curiosity that HN is supposed to foster?
Although HN comments can often be — if I may put it metaphorically — hit and run, like a graffiti wall, is that the ideal?
Maybe it is the ideal, and I'm missing the point. :-)
It matters what people post in the comments because the comments very much affect what sort of people HN manages to attract. You seem to be treating these two things as independent, but they are intensely interdependent.
That's why we keep asking you to follow the site guidelines. It's not just because your individual comments get better when you do that. It's also because the feedback loops involved (the effects of comment quality on the community) are large and existential for HN.
Sure, but the point of HN is to be interesting (specifically, to gratify intellectual curiosity), and unsubstantive comments undermine that no matter how many people agree with them. Actually, the larger that number is, the worse the effect they have.
The point is, using HN comments as a quality or truth filter doesn't work, especially since most people here only ever engage with the comments. It's the blind leading the blind here.
Thanks! Yeah, I've been thinking about that, especially because of the profoundly unrewarding nature of that conversation. A number of my previous HN comments are in Dercuano, Derctuo, and Dernocua, though those mostly consist of things other than HN comments, and some of the HN comments they contain are pretty embarrassing.
Generally I feel like the HN comments section is pretty aggressive and conformist, and there's a lot of people trolling. The social dynamic rewards rapid reaction, trolling, and conforming to the popular opinion (and especially cheering for it and denouncing those who disagree with it), and punishes the kind of careful investigation and thoughtful conversation that I value. I think it brings out the worst in me.
I agree with your point and find it quite disturbing myself. What punched me in my face in your article was that you asked people to comment on HN if they agreed. I quite honestly don't understand the reasoning behind this. Granted, I'm a new member on HN but asking for comments just for the sake of comments seems like broken Facebook "like"s.
The problem with HN comments is that you may make a very thoughtful and lengthy reply to someone...and no one ever reads or sees it because stories scroll off the frontpage so quickly. And it isn't easy to check up on old discussions you participated in, so your thoughtful comments are buried.
I think it is detrimental to the community and encourages all the wrong kinds of behavior.
The amount of speculation with regards to topics usually about race, gender, and politics but sometimes even science and programming among “engineers” and “innovators” is kind of amazing.
The HN community appears to be no more rational or evidence-based than those found in the comments section of Fox News or the New York Times.
Example comments found here:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25229544
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23983974
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23696427
It’s all conjecture and anecdotes. Rarely will someone take the time to research and post links to evidence to improve the conversation.
1. What hope do we have if creators and maintainers are prone to the same proclivities as the users?
2. What can HN do to make not only it’s commenting section better but also improve the quality of commenting on the interwebs? Why?
On HN, we want curious conversation in which people are thoughtful and respectful toward each other. The idea is to collaborate in figuring out the truth together. I know it often seems like other people don't care about that, but a lot of this is an artifact of the medium, because internet comments lack the out-of-band signals that we normally rely on to evaluate other people's intentions.
Also, it's easy to perceive (and/or imagine) bad faith in others, and difficult to perceive the equivalent in oneself. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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