Comment by epolanski
3 days ago
Controversial content is discussed more than positive one, that's a well known phenomenon from gossiping with friends to discussing politics online to whatever.
I always bring the same example: if one of your best friends has troubles with it's partner you'll hear for hours. But when things go smooth they have nothing to say and you have little to add.
This is well known, and why forums that wanted to maintain their quality would consistently lock such threads going back at least 20+ years when I started using forums. Reddit, Facebook, et al, do the opposite. Its why they feel so bad to use over time - they are engineered to tap into this and to promote it. HN thrives because they very consciously do the opposite.
I'm sure many of us would take it much further, but I hope we can appreciate its not an easy task.
I'm tired of this point being repeated. This is not universally true. I'm in communities where the more active discussions are not ragebait.
I'd say HN's problem is rooted in that many folks participate in malicious contrarianism.
>I'm in communities where the more active discussions
And they are heavily moderated against negative discussion/ragebait.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/
>specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.
This is a human problem and it happens everywhere.
How can you know the moderation style of the spaces I visit, when I haven't even linked them here?
4 replies →
> And they are heavily moderated against negative discussion/ragebait.
So? You have to do that because it takes one toxic person to poison the well. HN is aggressively moderated to get rid of articles and opinions that don't belong too. Without it, it would be just a constant stream of self-promotion and politics.
The point is that in certain other places, someone (the moderators) worked to nourish a positive culture and it worked. HN didn't and it shows. I don't think that negativity is necessary to keep the forum interesting. Especially given that HN's negativity really isn't all that insightful. A lot of negative takes are bad, and many of them are written without reading the article, or by cherrypicking a single sentence and attacking that.
4 replies →
There's a lot of scientific evidence that negative and controversial content has multiple psychological effects of high emotional arousal, triggers the confrontation effect and toxicity breeds retention.
We're more likely to keep arguing here when disagreeing than to agree and add much.
And again, this isn't limited to internet but irl too.
It depends how you want to measure engagement and activity. Quality of discussion is something to consider. It's very difficult to have a proper discussion when all of the responses are the same expected replies to low-effort ragebait.
There's a saying : No News is Good news.
Unfortunately "No News" doesn't make for a very good website.
That’s a factor, but the Reddit hive mind can take even non-controversial posts and turn them into a toxic, cynical cesspool of comments.
When I was still visiting Reddit my subreddit list was short and focused on a few hobbies and tech topics. Even those subreddits had become overtaken with cynical doomerism and toxic responses to everything. For a while I could still get some value out of select comments, but eventually everyone who wanted real discussion gave up and left. Now even when interesting or helpful topics get posted it’s like the commenters are sharks circling and waiting for any opportunity to bring doom and gloom to any subject.
It depends on the platform. Most of the platforms reward content engagement, no matter if the content is positive or negative.
Engagement means money. Even if this is bait content then you get rewarded (on TikTok, X, YouTube, you directly get cash).
Even here controversy is indirectly rewarded here because it creates engagement, and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone;
You get points for every answer that someone does to your comment, and the downvotes you get on your own comments don't offset the gained points.
These points have real utility to make money indirectly: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.
[...]
and it helps to bootstrap your project or grab new customers for free (at most 1 day of writing the bot script).
Let's say, you want to launch a new Juicero, and nobody knows about it yet, it's great to be able to push it on the homepage of HN, otherwise nobody is going to notice.
> These points have utility: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.
<1: Troll
<10: Throwaway
<60: Troll
<300: Probably a throwaway. Quality varies widely.
>500, <1000: Normal people
>1000, account less than 6 months old: Redditor, all content will be political or occasionally about Linux, most comments will be inflammatory.
<1000, >10,000, account less than 5 years old: Mostly normal users. Quality isn’t generally great.
<10,000, >30,000, account 10+ years old: Usually the best quality posts; karma and age suggest consistent contributions overtime without any of the personality disorders that go with being terminally online.
>100,000, account <5 years old: Redditor, all content will be political or occasionally about Linux, most comments will be inflammatory. Lots of flagged submissions about US politics.
>100,000, 10+ years old: Domain knowledge expert. Usually an older user with enough of a reputation that a subset of users know the user’s real identity. Will occasionally post absolutely unhinged comments.
This is hilarious, particularly the last sentence.
The absolute key feature is the domain experts, not the karma. Any time any subject comes up, someone appears that knows everything about the subject and lives in the field. It’s the single best thing about HN by a million miles.
1 reply →
You can have millions of upvotes just with jokes.
I remember a guy that had millions just because on any reddit AMA asked "tits or ass?"
2 replies →
I believe the only threshold that might warrant karma-farming on HN is 100 points? Is that when you can actually downvote? After that karma was certainly not on my radar.
I'm trying to establish, if you'll believe me, that I'm not whoring.
And yet, I confess to generally towing the cynical line in my comments. But that's my nature. "Atta boy", piling on, bandwagoning—antithetical to my nature. In fact I'm always suspicious when a thing appears to have no downside.
I can say too at times, I'll take a stand in opposition to what I actually believe in order to call myself out—or, you know, cast doubt. I suspect ego comes in to play too—it's kind of a challenge to take the unpopular opinion and champion it.
In short, I think if I generally agree with the sentiment in the thread, I don't comment.
I like to defend the devil here as well, because I see it as an interesting challenge / puzzle. It is very intellectually motivating and difficult to find compelling arguments that can move someone's opinion. Like verbal judo.
1 reply →
I think it's 500 points, or at least it used to be.
3 replies →
> and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone
Seems like the downsides are about the same as in other forums. It depends on if your account is anonymous or not.
> You get points for every answer that someone does to your comment, and the downvotes you get on your own comments don't offset the gained points.
I don’t think that’s right. You don’t get points for replies, you get points for upvotes. And downvotes you get also affect your overall karma, though you don’t seemingly have an upper bound on upvotes but I have read there is a lower bound of -4. An upvote on a submission seems to also be worth less than an upvote on a comment, though I’m not sure of the ratio (half? one third?).
> These points have real utility to make money indirectly: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.
I don’t think that’s right either. Once you can downvote and flag (500 karma?), more points don’t give you anything extra. Personally I rarely check someone’s points, only when viewing comment history or trying to identify spammers and other obvious bad actors.
> This is why I am collecting points on all my fake accounts, because once I have collected enough karma points, I can upvote my startup speech on Hackernews using these shadow accounts.
HN has voting ring detection. Though I can’t speak for how effective it is.
I don't think YC startups need to sneak to promote their startups - they can just ask the moderators to give them a boost.
Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the comment is removed.
> Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the comment is removed.
If that is an example for how your usual comments look like, I can assure you it has nothing to do with whether you criticize capitalism or not. A low-effort single-sentence mood statement is just not a good fit for the site.
I've seen plenty of anti-Capitalism comments on HN. To be sure, not the popular opinion.
4 replies →
I am genuinely none sure.
I would tend to think that this goes naturally:
you get boosted by a circle of people you know, and who wants you to succeed, because if you succeed they will get money), so there is the incentive in some way.
but it's still plausible that getting a boost on HN is part of the package (but I am not sure it is needed, because of this natural push that you get from let's say 100 people around you).
What you said about capitalism is true, I noticed it too, and it sounds even strange to me, as we are literally on a board that is initiated by a capitalist fund.
"you're posting too fast; please slow down"