PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

That is plainly insufficient. There's serious outrage, polarization, and lack of nuance on this site about a variety of topics. Privacy, anything google, amazon, or Uber, gender and racial politics, Facebook, etc. There's more going on here than the profit motive.

The problem isn't that these companies want to make a profit. The problem is they make it easy for people to get what they want, and users seek out outrage and polarization. I think that combined with the globalizing tendency of ubiquitous, high bandwidth, low latency, broadcast-capable connections is a real problem. But since I believe it's a human nature thing, I'm much less sure of how to solve it, especially while respecting the free speech value.

Using the fact that CmdrTaco commented in that twitter thread, i want to bring into comment slashdot moderation system. I always thought it was better than simple upvote/downvote because the "tags" (insightful, interesting, flamebait,troll) enticed you to think twice about the modding, preventing knee-jerk nodding reaction.

The fact that often the most voted comments on hacker news are the most extreme (saying something is completely wrong) shows that we love correcting people and will discount a good conversation in place of some virtual approval.

> There's serious outrage, polarization, and lack of nuance on this site about a variety of topics.

That doesn't feel like a huge issue here. I see tough topics brought up often and them being passionately discussed, but it generally goes quite civilily. I would not say there is lack of nuance at all - I learn a lot from reading people's counterpoints.

I mean, it's not perfect, but compared to other online discussion areas, it doesn't feel like a total waste of time to get into a nuanced discussion here.

Sometimes I vote something up because I want to see a good counterargument in the replies. Should I not be doing this?

you should vote however you think will foster good discussion, and that sounds like as good a reason as any. another would be voting based on how you think the posts should be ordered from best to worst, regardless of agreement with individual posts.

As much as I resist futile internet arguments, I find that I can't help myself when I read someone being blatantly wrong about something I know. I feel some nearly irresistible urge to "correct" them, knowing fully well that my arguments will have no impact.

Here's the thing: before the internet and social media, you simply didn't encounter that many patently false arguments in your day to day life. Everything you read or saw was produced by journalists and writers (not bloggers) who had access to their parent organization's resources. Political bias aside, if a TIME or NYT editor let something go to print, it meant that it had gone through at least some basic fact check.

But that's not true online. Anyone can write anything, facts be damned. And worse, in your social media feed, a carefully researched article occupies the same space as some random guy's harebrained conspiracy theories.

We can't limit the amount of "wrongness" online. Best we can do is learn to live with it

> Sometimes I vote something up because I want to see a good counterargument in the replies. Should I not be doing this?

I usually will up vote something if I can't see an obvious reason why it was downvoted...I've seen too many downvotes for dogmatic reasons and don't really post much here because of this.

I've done this too. A thing to note is that complaining about downvotes or how you expect something you posted to be downvoted tends to attract downvotes. Kind of weird, but just the way voting forums tend to go.

I've done this at times to a well-written argument that I disagree with. Could be just basic fairness, hoping to attract somebody to counter-argue, or possibly to help it rise above more poorly-reasoned arguments for the same thing, or even to make my own counter-argument post more visible.

Why don’t you offer your own counter? Just curious

It’s no longer true at those media organizations either, if it ever was.

'voting' doesn't foster good discussion it harms it.

I'm not saying it's relatively terrible here compared to the rest of the internet. I'm more thinking about the stridence of typical discussions, say, pre-1980. Simply, there was not a context where the typical person could go to have or witness aggressive partisan argumentation, be it about a company, a political system, whatever. Certainly, very, very few people could cause their statements to be broadcast to more than a handful of folks. Whereas your humble correspondent has probably gotten hundreds of impressions on these modest thoughts he has posted here. Another thing that wasn't present was the space for those views to feed back on themselves and become more intense, more passionate, and more aggressive.

That doesn't mean everything about the world was better back then. But this one thing was different.

I think it remains to be seen how much all this really matters. We probably won't know until they're writing the history books about this time.

There are many discussion sites without voting, and yet you are here.

sure, voting can sometimes hinder discussions by collapsing the many dimensions of judgement and value into a single binary, with loads of information loss on the way, but indistinct pronouncements like that are exactly why mechanisms like voting are implemented in the first place, to weed out shallow submissions to give space to more considered ones.

Sometimes I do. If I don't, it's probably because I just don't have the time or energy to write a well-reasoned counter-argument at the moment. Or maybe because I don't know enough, and don't feel like doing the research to support what I think. Getting sucked into internet arguments at work or while working on my own projects is just terrible for productivity and focus.

I can't speak for Time, which has gone through a lot of ownership travails recently (albeit not as dire as Newsweek), but there are certainly still magazines and newspapers that do fact-checking. Some have full-time fact checking departments; the New Yorker in specific and Condé Nast publications in general are historically known for that. Newspapers may not employ people with the title of "fact checker" (although the New York Times has at least one staff reporter who does, in fact, have that title, Linda Qiu), but it's something that's generally the job of the editorial staff to do fact-checking.

Sure, newspapers fail at this occasionally, especially with articles that get rushed due to timeliness -- and unless it's a big long-form investigative journalism piece, it's quite likely only what editors consider the major elements have been vetted. (The old saw "if the paper got this small detail wrong, how can I trust them on the big claims they're making" largely has it backward: the big claims are the ones they want receipts for, whereas the small details are more likely to get passed through without due checking. This is, at the least, what I was told by a newspaper editor many years ago!)

The trouble is normal people are turned off by being downvoted and never post another considered comment.

Sure it's uncharted territory and we've run into some issues but it's not all downsides. One upside of such easy communication is the unprecedented availability of knowledge.

Discussions on topics for which HN has a significant number of users who are experts are almost always incredibly insightful. The same mechanism that allows for broadcasting a view to a much larger number of people is also what facilitates that outcome. It does so by allowing us to fit more people into the same context (in a functional manner) than ever before.

Historically the best a room with more than ~15 people or so could do was to host a lecture of some sort. Now we occasionally manage to achieve productive and insightful discourse involving hundreds of people simultaneously. (The dynamics are a bit different of course but that's not the point.)

Partisan argumentation was f2f, in self-selecting meetings. I suspect some of the things said in some of those contexts were far more extreme than is common today - but the median today is likely more polarised and heated.

I was on AOL in the mid-90s, and some parts were at least as toxic as Facebook.

Ultimately it's set by the quality of the moderation but also by the quality of the people. You need people who have some self-awareness and restraint, and who can tolerate dissenting views without exploding all over them.

I've just watched a music forum explode. The mods couldn't quite work out how to handle a difficult situation, there were wildly polarised views, and virtually everyone seemed to be operating from negative assumptions and bad faith without actually listening to what was being said.

It was honestly one of the ugliest things I've ever seen online.

Does it matter? I think it does. Civility is the foundation of culture. Most people at least attempt it, with varying degrees of success - but some people really aren't interested in it, because they prefer their hit of outrage.

I can't see how that can possibly be a good thing. Even if the aims are good, the means are mean and there's a general reduction in empathy and collective intelligence. None of these are good.

I really don't know how we get past this. Maybe we don't, and various bad things have to happen before that becomes an option.

But I am absolute sure now that the influence of mass social media is almost entirely toxic - like tobacco for the mind. The industry badly needs regulation, de-monopolisation and federation, but it's very hard to see that happening.

Voting something up because you want it to appear higher on the page seems like about the most rational way to use voting. :)

The problem is not with the upvotes, but with the downvotes. These have the effect of silencing any oppinions that the majority of voters don’t agree with (as the message gets invisible). This should only be used with low quality messages, otherwise the result is that there will only be a single line of thought, like a broken record.

Unfortunately, this happens here a lot.

downvoting is dimensionally-collapsed feedback and requires nuanced examination to internalize well. so it makes sense to self-examine a bit, then dampen the internalization to account for ambiguity (rather than quitting). that builds both flexibility and resiliency.

sometimes you get no feedback at all, which is even more ambiguous. feedback always exhibits degrees of ambiguity, so we gotta figure these things out at some point in life (well, we don't, but that's worse), and this is a great place to practice.

> Using the fact that CmdrTaco commented in that twitter thread, i want to bring into comment slashdot moderation system. I always thought it was better than simple upvote/downvote because the "tags" (insightful, interesting, flamebait,troll) enticed you to think twice about the modding, preventing knee-jerk nodding reaction.

I to would prefer the feedback mechanism on HN be more informative than a simple upvote downvote - it would be nice to know for example if downvotes are due to objective disagreement on facts vs ideology, things like that. Yes there could be negatives with this change, but there could also be positives...at the very least it would be nice to know the reason why we don't allow voters to attach reasoning to their vote.

Most normal people correctly assume that the culture is toxic and move on.