I'm curious how many people who have the ability to upvote or flag stories actually do so. For my part, I'm very conservative:<p>- I never flag stories; I may not find a story interesting, but I don't feel it's appropriate to impose my interests on others or 'police' their discussions.<p>- I rarely upvote stories, mostly because I'm usually browsing stories that are already on the front-page. Occasionally I skim through the new stories and if I see something interesting there I might upvote it.<p>- For comments, I upvote comments I find particularly helpful or insightful. I don't downvote comments very often unless they're particularly rude. However, I never downvote comments that are part of a discussion I'm having; I don't trust my impartiality in that case.<p>If my behavior is typical, then stories are being controlled by a 'vocal minority' who take the time to upvote or flag them. As in any group, the vocal minority tends to have the more fundamentalist / extremist points of view on a subject, which could lead to the outcomes TFA discusses.
<i>Stories that discuss the difficulties faced by minorities in our field are summarily disappeared.</i><p>Really?<p>I've tended to notice the opposite: new ones are constantly appearing, they get lots of comments, inspire heated debates and most sentiments are sympathetic, sometimes to an almost unhealthy and postmodern degree.
"The original story linked to a review of peer-reviewed scientific research."<p>I believe the credit we assign to peer reviewed scientific, mathematical, or engineering papers shouldn't be anywhere near the same weight we assign to peer reviewed social science papers. I dealt with quite a lot of these papers early in my career and they do a wonderful job of backing up grant proposals but a poor job of being correct.<p>My takeaway was that they tried to present some idea as universal when it really required the culture of the researcher in the geographical area the researcher was studying[1]. The second problem is that they didn't understand what they were studying. They didn't think that way.<p>Now, don't get me wrong, there are some amazing researchers whose results were really useful, but the lack of true rigor in many of these studies is just poor. Don't get me started about the damn math errors or "correlation does not imply causation" arguments.<p>1) Community risk factor studies have to be the worst. The number of them that only studied urban settings, but believed their results applied to rural areas is astounding.
<p><pre><code> Pope remains Catholic
12 points by BCM43 56 minutes ago | flag | discuss
Bear shits in wood
32 points by BCM43 21 minutes ago | flag | discuss</code></pre>
Flamewars != disagreements. Discouraging flamewars (namecalling, counterproductive arguing that devolves into ad hominem and unrelated attacks) doesn't mean it kills stories that generate disagreement and discussion. I've had many a disagreement in HN threads, been convinced that my original stance was wrong, and (I believe) convinced others that their original stance was wrong (or incomplete, or to change something about it). I've also learned a lot from simply posting what my understanding of an issue is and letting those more familiar add to it. The fact that HN does not want to go the way of Usenet/Reddit/4chan/name a forum doesn't make it an echo chamber.<p>I hope people disagree with me in this thread and prove my point.
The author's sole example is incorrect. Paul Graham did not dismiss any peer reviewed research. The original article provided no argument (peer reviewed or otherwise) asserting that natural born programmers were a myth - the cited research merely argued that the belief in natural born programmers was harmful. Paul Graham gave an anecdote explaining why he believed in natural born programmers.
The whole argument of the article is a non-starter:<p><i>Building a social echo chamber risks marginalising us from the rest of society, gradually becoming ignored and irrelevant as our self-reinforcing opinions drift ever further away from the mainstream</i><p>I don't consume movies, books, music, food, web sites, or much of anything else because they're "mainstream".<p>I do so because they have a high degree of quality that holds my interests. Mainstream is often the opposite of quality.<p>The more mainstream HN becomes, the less desirable it becomes. If I wanted mainstream I'd spend more time looking at Slashdot and Reddit.
Abundance of throw-away accounts to express a potentially unpopular opinion is a good evidence of a groupthink environment. People either afraid to lose karma or be scrutinized or otherwise upset the mods.<p>I can often see people opening their comments with a hefty preamble, which goal is to justify the following controversial opinion, in hopes that it will not bring or at least lessen the wrath of the mob.<p>And of course people like their idols, too. When PG makes a comment - it's a godsend and instantly attracts the fervent following. In a similar manner, there's no lack of ardent supporters of Google that will rationalize any move by the company in a way that is good for the world.
Seems his prime complaint is that resonating consternation is aggressively removed, giving an undue illusion of peace and harmony - and somehow that's a bad thing.<p>Some issues are social hot buttons, with a roughly even split (if not in actual numbers, then in energy exerted in pushback against the opposing view), roughly equal validity to each perspective, and pretty much no chance of one side reversing their view en masse in short order. Repeated prolonged verbose heated arguments over these subjects will not lead to any meaningful consensus. Their presence tends to erupt as a tangent or non-sequitur to another discussion, destroying the overall thread in a wave of verbose hysteria. Nothing is served by their recurrence; we all know there's a dramatic split on views regarding the subject, we are each settled in our own views thereon, and frequent re-hashing the subject just sours the environment and encourages participants to seek more sensible discussions elsewhere. Ergo, <i>there's no point in letting these recur</i>. PG is right in weighting the algorithm so such destructive & pointless discussions tend to disappear.<p>Yes, we know such disagreements exist. A policy of "not here, guys" is a <i>good</i> thing. Yes, the issues being suppressed are of great sociopolitical importance; please recognize that decent people can disagree over them, please agree to disagree, and resolving that disagreement will <i>not</i> happen here - but continued rehashing thereof <i>will</i> create a toxic environment.
This is just a natural consequence of Hacker News not being a free market. The state controls of the karma system practically guarantee inefficiency in the free exchange of ideas. We need to stop subsidizing mediocrity.
Not every forum is obligated to be as democratic and decentralized as 4chan or Reddit. I like HN <i>because</i> it's more focused, and in some cases more aggressively moderated, even if the mechanisms for doing so are more opaque/blunt/arbitrary/etc. than in other forums. If HN was the only place on the web to discuss anything, I would be much more concerned about the points raised by this article. Fortunately it's not.
"There are no social problems in the technology industry. We have always been at war with Eastasia."<p>Boy oh boy, I sure love me some Orwell references.<p>Referencing 1984 should be on par with referencing Hitler. It's just a lazy debate tactic. If you have a good point you can make it without resorting to these much-too-often used references.<p>Orwell himself went against it his essay "Politics and the English Language". Read it. It'll do you good.
Hacker News is a meta-experiment on confirmation bias. In every meta-discussion I see on the "bias" in HN, there is always someone saying "HN is biased against X" and "HN is biased against <i>not</i> X". It's in the comments linked in this story, and I see it all over HN itself. My best explanation for that is an individual's confirmation bias.
Especially after pg's response to the blog post about sexual assault at CodeMash, I wonder—why can't the flamewar detector just disable comments?<p>I tend to have a lot of respect for pg, and found his apology for what happened in that thread to be admirable. Whether or not preventing discussion of the issue on HN is positive or negative...I have very complex feelings on the issue, and see valid arguments on both sides.<p>What I do not have mixed feelings about, however, is that these issues need to be put front and center, so that people in our industry a) know they exist b) know how common they are c) are inspired to make personal effort to fix it. I would hope that pg agrees.<p>If he does, why not make such stories, when they set off the flamewar detector, maintain their ranking, but disable comments? That way, the issue is still raised, and people are still alerted to it, but it prevents the (some believe) "unproductive" discussion.
What HN should do is add a feature where readers can upvote stories so they can have their say about what is on the front page. This would address OP's concerns.<p></sarcasm>
A wise man once said,<p>"Seeking clarity is more valuable than agreement."<p>That changed the way I think about writing, and sharing my opinions or discussing other people's ideas. If you go into a disagreement looking to better understand what led the other party to their beliefs, you typically have a more mature and interesting discussion. Plus, <i>why</i> someone believes something I completely disagree with is more interesting than the what, anyway.
It is likely in the end that you both may agree to disagree, (a lost art in this age), but at least you can converse respectfully about complex ideas like adults.
Funny, my concerns about the social climate here are rather different. But I suspect writing this type of article is probably not the way to fix things. When people feel attacked, they get defensive and tend to become more entrenched, not less, due to trying to justify their behavior.
Well culture is an echo chamber. It does not mean it's bad.<p>I see it as there is a certain culture here, one which i happen to be in agreement with most of the time, while there is still room for dissent.
In other words, a place focused on particular subjects (technology, programming, science) collects people with similar life experiences, interests, worldviews, etc.
I tend to agree with the premise of the article, but found this line from a self described "big government" type, funny:<p>We have always been at war with Eastasia.
<i>Stories that appear to challenge the narrative that good programmers are just naturally talented tend to vanish.</i><p>Wait, is that the common narrative? Surely the only people who believe that are the elderly, who just can't shake the "child genius" idea of programmers they were fed in the seventies and eighties?
My stuff has been on the front page twice, and I'm a left wing, big government Canadian.<p>Some people can be a little cranky, we're computer guys ffs, but I think the discourse here is pretty civil and open minded.
HN is privately run by pg. He's allowed to set the rules whichever way he wants.<p>Just because the author wants it to be run a certain way doesn't mean that it should. If he doesn't like how it's done and thinks that issues that he believes are important should be discussed, he should make his own news aggregator site, instead of trying to hijack an already-established site for his own agenda.<p>If the majority start disagreeing with the curation of HN articles, then they will leave to other places, like reddit. And frankly, I'm not sure that pg even cares if this happens, he didn't start HN to increase his popularity or his influence.
Hacker News was a social echo chamber long before there was flagging or flamewar detection. I think it's just an inherent law in any small, passionate community.
We are all pretty like-minded and I see nothing wrong with that. This isn't Congress, it's the Hacker News Social Club. You can leave when you like.