Nepal moves to block Facebook, X, YouTube and others

> pushes content triggering strong emotional reactions should be banned

Aren't you describing your own comment? Aren't upvotes pushing that to the top? So isn't HN the thing that needs to be banned according to your comment?

No. Facebook algorithm produces different outputs for every user. HN's algorithm produces one output for all users.

They are qualitatively distinct. Facebooks' algorithm is demonstrably harmful. HN's not so much.

Do you have proof that demonstrates that FB's algorithm is more harmful than upvotes on HN or Reddit? Not that it's harmful compared to a world before FB, that it's more harmful than an upvote based algorithm.

This is a really canonical example of a "Yet you participate in a society. Curious!" post. Well done.

[0] https://imgur.com/we-should-improve-society-somewhat-T6abwxn

The opposite, actually - I remember reading that HN downranks posts that have a low favorability:engagement ratio - in its case, high comment count and comparatively low votes. The reasoning being that flamebait topics inspire a disproportionate number of angry/low-substance/pile-on comments and retort-chains compared to normal topics, without garnering a corresponding increase in top-level votes.

It's imperfect, but afaik most social media does the opposite (all "engagement" is good engagement), and I imagine, say, Twitter would be much nicer if it tuned its algo to not propagate posts with an unusually high view/retweet count relative to likes.

That's interesting, it seems like it would accidentally penalize a lot of "good" posts too, like people asking questions to better understand a topic/perspective

Thanks. I try really hard. Wait was that supposed to be a backhanded compliment? No way, can't be, HN is above that kind of behavior (:

My point, overall, is that there is all the criticism of social media that excludes HN is based on vibes. And if we're about to ban social media for the EU then hopefully we have more than vibes to go off of.