Comment by jillyboel
5 months ago
> As some of you know, this article was posted a dozen times and immediately flagkilled by users
That's because HN appears to be disturbingly pro-trump and they seem to organize to flagkill anything "negative".
You really should look into organized flagkilling.
You need only look at the threads that HN has hosted about this to see that "pro-Trump" is a strong overstatement. The community is divided, just like the society at large is divided (or societies, since many countries are represented here).
Given what we know about the demographics of HN—for example, users here are probably more likely to be college-educated, many come from outside the U.S., and so on—the community here is probably less pro-Trump than the general U.S. population is, but that still leaves a great many users on both sides of that issue.
Of course I understand that any level of pro-$X can be disturbing if $X itself is disturbing enough. But that's more of a qualitative experience than a quantitative one. I've called it the "shock experience" in the past and wrote about it here, if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
You are not quite right and there are "organized groups" active on HN influencing sensitive topics. The equivalence you are making i.e. "society is divided, the HN community is a reflection of the society and therefore the community is divided" does not say anything about how specific groups may exploit the situation and push their agenda. They are not all rational actors nor is it a zero-sum game.
To understand what i mean take a look at;
1) Nassim Taleb's book Skin in the Game - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book). Specifically his The Minority Rule which basically states that an intransigent minority can almost always prevail over a flexible majority. It is the asymmetry which is being used to game the system.
Nassim Taleb's article The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority - https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Nassim Taleb & Naval Ravikant video on The Minority Rule - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwlW2aamDFc
2) Also see Game Theory(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory) and the books The Evolution of Cooperation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation), The Complexity of Cooperation(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Cooperation) by Robert Axelrod
Veritasium's video on Game Theory and Axelrod's tournaments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
Influence decision models: From cooperative game theory to social network analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15740...
A Survey of Game Theory as Applied to Social Networks - https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/TST.2020.9010005
it would be helpful to evidence your hypothesis with example threads here on HN, I guess. do you have examples at hand? And are you talking about "brigading", i.e. groups of HN users who organize outside HN to in dang's terms "activate" discussions inside HN? as in "hey brigade, please have a look at topic xyz: ..."? is this what you're talking about?
Why would it have to be organized flagkilling? A combination of a sizeable pro-Trump faction (even 20% of users would be more than enough) and a sizeable "just keep US politics off the front page" faction would be more than enough to account for what you're seeing.