Hacker News is a social echo chamber
Oct. 15th, 2013 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mjg59Hacker News is a fairly influential link aggregation site, with stories submitted and voted on by users. As explained in the FAQ, the ranking of stories is roughly determined by the number of votes divided by a function of the time since submission. It's not a huge traffic driver (my personal experience of stories on the front page is on the order of 30,000 hits), but it's notable because the demographic tends to include a more technically literate and influential set of readers than most other sites. The discussion that ensues from technical posts often includes meaningful feedback from domain experts. Stories that appear there are likely to be noted by technology workers, especially in the Silicon Valley startup field[1].
That rather specific demographic appears to correlate with other traits. There's a rather more techno-libertarian bias on Hacker News than on most general discussion forums, which is consistent with the startup-oriented culture that it springs from - the desire to provide disruptive solutions to real world problems tends to collide with existing regulatory frameworks, so it's unsurprising that a belief in individual rights and small government would overlap with US startup culture. There's a leaning towards the use of web technologies rather than traditional client applications, which matches what people are doing in the rest of the world. And there's more enthusiasm for liberal open-source licenses over Copyleft licenses, which makes sense in a web-focused environment (as I wrote about here).
Now, personally I'm a big-government, client-app, Copyleft kind of person, but for the most part I don't think the above is actively dangerous. It's inevitable that political views will vary, we'll probably continue to cycle between thick and thin clients for generations and nobody's ever going to demonstrably prove that one licensing model deserves to win over another. But what is important is that the ongoing debates between these opinions be driven by facts, and that it remain obvious that these disagreements exist. As far as technical (and even political) discussion goes, Hacker News doesn't seem to
have a problem with that. Disagreeing with the orthodoxy is tolerated.
This seems less true when it comes to social issues. When a posting discussing the myth of the natural born programmer[2] hit the front page, the top rated comment is Paul Graham[3] off-handedly discounting the conclusions drawn. The original story linked to a review of peer-reviewed scientific research. Graham simply discounts it on the basis of his preconceptions. Shortly afterwards, the story plummeted off the front page, now surrounded by stories posted around the same time but with much lower scores.
How does this happen? There's two publicised methods which can result in stories dropping down the order. Users with high karma scores (either via submitting popular stories or writing popular comments) are able to flag submissions, and if enough do so then a negative weighting is applied to the story. There's also a flamewar detector, a heuristic that attempts to detect contentious subjects and pushes them off the front page.
The effect of both is to enforce the status quo of social beliefs. Stories that appear to challenge the narrative that good programmers are just naturally talented tend to vanish. Stories that discuss the difficulties faced by minorities in our field are summarily disappeared. There are no social problems in the technology industry. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
This isn't healthy. We don't improve the state of the software industry by hiding stories that expose conflicts. Flamewars don't solve problems, but without them we'd be entirely unaware of how much of a victim blaming mentality exists amongst our peers. It's true that conflict may reinforce preconceptions, causing people to dig in as they defend their beliefs. However, the absence of conflict does nothing to counteract that. If you're never exposed to opinions you disagree with, you'll never question your existing beliefs.
Hacker News is a privately run site and nobody's under any obligation to change how they choose to run it. But the focus on avoiding conflict to such an extent that controversial stories receive less exposure than ones that fit people's existing beliefs doesn't enhance our community. If we want to be able to use technology as an instrument of beneficial change to society as a whole, we benefit from building a diverse and welcoming community and questioning our preconceptions. 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. It doesn't help anybody.
[1] During the batch of interviews I did last year, two separate interviewers both mentioned a story they'd read on Hacker News that turned out to have been written by me. I'm not saying that that's what determined a hire/don't hire decision, but it seems likely that it helped.
[2] The article in question discusses the pervasive idea that some people are inherently good programmers. It turns out that perpetuating the idea that some people are just born good at a particular skill actually discourages others from even trying to learn it, even those who are just as capable.
[3] One of the co-founders of Y-Combinator and creator of Hacker News.
(Edited to fix a footnote reference)
That rather specific demographic appears to correlate with other traits. There's a rather more techno-libertarian bias on Hacker News than on most general discussion forums, which is consistent with the startup-oriented culture that it springs from - the desire to provide disruptive solutions to real world problems tends to collide with existing regulatory frameworks, so it's unsurprising that a belief in individual rights and small government would overlap with US startup culture. There's a leaning towards the use of web technologies rather than traditional client applications, which matches what people are doing in the rest of the world. And there's more enthusiasm for liberal open-source licenses over Copyleft licenses, which makes sense in a web-focused environment (as I wrote about here).
Now, personally I'm a big-government, client-app, Copyleft kind of person, but for the most part I don't think the above is actively dangerous. It's inevitable that political views will vary, we'll probably continue to cycle between thick and thin clients for generations and nobody's ever going to demonstrably prove that one licensing model deserves to win over another. But what is important is that the ongoing debates between these opinions be driven by facts, and that it remain obvious that these disagreements exist. As far as technical (and even political) discussion goes, Hacker News doesn't seem to
have a problem with that. Disagreeing with the orthodoxy is tolerated.
This seems less true when it comes to social issues. When a posting discussing the myth of the natural born programmer[2] hit the front page, the top rated comment is Paul Graham[3] off-handedly discounting the conclusions drawn. The original story linked to a review of peer-reviewed scientific research. Graham simply discounts it on the basis of his preconceptions. Shortly afterwards, the story plummeted off the front page, now surrounded by stories posted around the same time but with much lower scores.
How does this happen? There's two publicised methods which can result in stories dropping down the order. Users with high karma scores (either via submitting popular stories or writing popular comments) are able to flag submissions, and if enough do so then a negative weighting is applied to the story. There's also a flamewar detector, a heuristic that attempts to detect contentious subjects and pushes them off the front page.
The effect of both is to enforce the status quo of social beliefs. Stories that appear to challenge the narrative that good programmers are just naturally talented tend to vanish. Stories that discuss the difficulties faced by minorities in our field are summarily disappeared. There are no social problems in the technology industry. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
This isn't healthy. We don't improve the state of the software industry by hiding stories that expose conflicts. Flamewars don't solve problems, but without them we'd be entirely unaware of how much of a victim blaming mentality exists amongst our peers. It's true that conflict may reinforce preconceptions, causing people to dig in as they defend their beliefs. However, the absence of conflict does nothing to counteract that. If you're never exposed to opinions you disagree with, you'll never question your existing beliefs.
Hacker News is a privately run site and nobody's under any obligation to change how they choose to run it. But the focus on avoiding conflict to such an extent that controversial stories receive less exposure than ones that fit people's existing beliefs doesn't enhance our community. If we want to be able to use technology as an instrument of beneficial change to society as a whole, we benefit from building a diverse and welcoming community and questioning our preconceptions. 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. It doesn't help anybody.
[1] During the batch of interviews I did last year, two separate interviewers both mentioned a story they'd read on Hacker News that turned out to have been written by me. I'm not saying that that's what determined a hire/don't hire decision, but it seems likely that it helped.
[2] The article in question discusses the pervasive idea that some people are inherently good programmers. It turns out that perpetuating the idea that some people are just born good at a particular skill actually discourages others from even trying to learn it, even those who are just as capable.
[3] One of the co-founders of Y-Combinator and creator of Hacker News.
(Edited to fix a footnote reference)
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no subject
Date: 2013-10-15 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-15 08:17 pm (UTC)In essence, what I want is to read stuff that is "interesting" to m. Since my personal interests are pretty closely aligned with many of the people on HN, the voting system allows me to quickly see what they find interesting.
The voting system is a very low barrier to collecting this information -- people can click a little triangle and give information about what they found interesting, instead of having to post a blog entry about it. I read interesting stuff all the time, but I almost never blog about it. Yet, I am likely to click the triangle -- giving some information to the system.
A little information from a thousand people gives a ranked view of stuff that has a high probability of being interesting to me, but stuff someone chooses to blog about has a much larger false negative rate -- I miss things I would have found interesting, but it wasn't interesting enough for someone to take the time to blog about. (I also read very few blogs.)
no subject
Date: 2013-10-15 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-15 11:24 pm (UTC)Whether or not people are different at birth seems to be a major sticking point for a certain category of publicists, a type I am all too familiar with. Whenever you mention it, those seemingly rational individuals will try to deny facts to the extent that will make global warming skeptics seem downright cute by comparison.
Eagerly awaiting for the next utopianist editorial about how the world consists of sugar and spice and we are all the same on the inside and if only the powers that be enforced it.
no subject
Date: 2013-10-16 12:25 am (UTC)The sky is blue.
Date: 2013-10-16 12:54 am (UTC)This is how on line forums work. This is how sports bars work (pick a team). This is how *people* work.
I'm not saying it's right in some way but rather that these sites don't have a magical solution to the wider problem. Don't expect forums to solve everything. Treat almost every (well, ok, every) forum as a viewpoint and not as a collection of viewpoints.
(And I need to fix my OpenID. ugh. Using a dead provider.)
Re: Making a point that disagrees = hellbann
Date: 2013-10-16 12:55 pm (UTC)Agree with mjg's post wholeheartedly. Nothing has convinced me that silicon valley is not the future like reading HackerNews on a semi-regular basis. Can you even imagine the distopian conditions if everyone scrabbling for venture capital to "change the world" actually wound up getting their wish?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6532738
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6521376
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6091412
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4382824
Re: I see only one view is tolerated here.
Date: 2013-10-16 10:02 pm (UTC)And, y'know? I don't miss them one bit.
But of course software development skills are inherited!
Date: 2013-10-16 10:16 pm (UTC)But this is not the world we live in. Were the invention of fire and the for loop not, as near as we can determine, simultaneous? Thank goodness it is so easy to answer this question. And thank goodness we were able to defeat Homo sapiens in those ancient hackathons-for-mates in 40,000 BC and raise Neanderthal man to his present place of pre-eminence.
Re: Hacker News alternatives
Date: 2013-10-17 01:06 am (UTC)I would assume that is a primary source of news.
Re: You don't disagree with PG or you get shadow banned
Date: 2013-10-18 06:21 am (UTC)This is exactly why I was banned, and I am one of those Keynesian-Krugmanite leftists that you don't really care for. Just not a stupid enough one.
Disappearing stories
Date: 2014-05-21 05:57 pm (UTC)Its URL is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7777829 . The title is "How I Feel as Young Father Involved in Early-stage Startup". The story and the comments did not cast a good light on startups in general.
Since Hacker News is nothing but a promotional tool for Y Combinator, I image Paul Graham or one of his goons decided that such stories were bad for business, and promptly dropped it in the toilet.
I consider Hacker News to be essentially a type of cult.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-30 09:18 pm (UTC)Re: You don't disagree with PG or you get shadow banned
Date: 2014-10-30 09:19 pm (UTC)