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If this were true you'd have the average opinion filter out - naysayers would downvote supporters and vice versa. The truth is in fact that hn is hypocritical a

If this were true you'd have the average opinion filter out - naysayers would downvote supporters and vice versa. The truth is in fact that hn is hypocritical and becomes outraged for the sake of outrage just like every other opinionated group (where the raison d etre is to express an opinion rather than discourse). Edit: think hn isn't just about getting attention? Then explain to me why responses are ranked? Or even ranked without requiring a response? Even Amazon reviews in principle require leaving ratings only in good faith (ie having engaged with the product). It's obvious and dang and whomever could make that a perquisite of voting. That they haven't proves my point.

pessimizer 6y ago
The Law of Averages isn't actually a law, and everything doesn't balance out in the end.
- throwlaplace 6y ago
  Lol the law of large numbers (the real name for the law of averages) is absolutely a law and it's exactly the phenomenon I'm alluding to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
all-fakes 6y ago
Responses have to be ranked, because some comments are much more valuable to the reader than others. Well-thought-out comments and spam lie at the extreme ends of the spectrum. I think there's merit to the idea of requiring a response for upvotes or downvotes, but how can you tell whether a response is "genuine"? It sounds like it'd devolve into people leaving vacuous replies just to clear that prerequisite.
- throwlaplace 6y ago
  >comments are much more valuable to the reader than others This presupposes some kind of universal value function. >but how can you tell whether a response is "genuine"? It sounds like it'd devolve into people leaving vacuous replies just to clear that prerequisite This is like perfect is the enemy of good counterargument. I don't know and I'm not going to hypothesize right here right now where one misstep on my part gives credence to the idea that it's impossible. Here's what I'll say though about modern forums: they fixed a system that wasn't broken as far as discourse goes. When I was in high school the were forums where responses were ordered in time rather than by popularity. Those places were actual venues for discussion. Ranking only exists for monetization. If you don't agree with this then consider professional venues for discourse: academic journals. I have never browsed a journal or arxiv by the number of citations or the hindex or whatever.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > This presupposes some kind of universal value function. Yes: "a majority of HN readers of this comment found it useful / not useful". That's the best you're going to get. But for the most part, it does actually work. If 80% of people on the site agree that a comment is useful, that's good enough; it's unreasonable to expect any evaluation of subjective matters to be universal. And that's why moderators will step in and do some manual tweaking if things get very divisive. If that 80% number (that I made up) drops too low, getting too close to 50%, then that means that the discussion just isn't likely to be productive. HN is not a homogeneous group, and sometimes the there isn't a clear majority in agreement. > Here's what I'll say though about modern forums: they fixed a system that wasn't broken as far as discourse goes. When I was in high school the were forums where responses were ordered in time rather than by popularity I don't agree with this. One reason is the lack of threading. phpBB and its contemporaries just had a list of posts, and all replies linearly under each post link. Digging through for the bits you actually care about was a huge pain in the ass, and it's one of the reasons why I never enjoyed fora like that. The other reason is just scale. I'm not sure how old you are, but I was in HS in the late 90s. Back then the internet was much smaller, not as commercialized, and people generally behaved decently well toward each other. We didn't have the spambots we do today, and every forum site wasn't under constant attack by people who want to destroy online communities just for fun. I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was a lot easier to manage communities back then and keep discourse civil and on-topic, with very few automated tools at hand. These days it's pretty much impossible to create high quality discussions at any scale without a ranking system. Sure, you see smaller communities of a few hundred, maybe even a thousand, people where these things work sorta like they did 20+ years ago (but I guarantee you the board itself is doing a ton of automated spam filtering to get you there). HN has... what? Tens of thousands, or likely more than a hundred thousand users. If you enabled showdead in your profile page, you'll see a lot of garbage that gets through the automated filters and ends up flagged out of existence. And even regardless of that, with a community this size, you're going to have enough disagreement on the fundamentals of any complex topic that you're going to get a ton of disagreement. Voting and flagging is far from perfect, but it can help it from devolving into a cesspool of low-effort comments and outright name-calling.
  - antepodius 6y ago

pessimizer 6y ago

The Law of Averages isn't actually a law, and everything doesn't balance out in the end.

throwlaplace 6y ago
Lol the law of large numbers (the real name for the law of averages) is absolutely a law and it's exactly the phenomenon I'm alluding to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

all-fakes 6y ago

Responses have to be ranked, because some comments are much more valuable to the reader than others. Well-thought-out comments and spam lie at the extreme ends of the spectrum. I think there's merit to the idea of requiring a response for upvotes or downvotes, but how can you tell whether a response is "genuine"? It sounds like it'd devolve into people leaving vacuous replies just to clear that prerequisite.

throwlaplace 6y ago
>comments are much more valuable to the reader than others This presupposes some kind of universal value function. >but how can you tell whether a response is "genuine"? It sounds like it'd devolve into people leaving vacuous replies just to clear that prerequisite This is like perfect is the enemy of good counterargument. I don't know and I'm not going to hypothesize right here right now where one misstep on my part gives credence to the idea that it's impossible. Here's what I'll say though about modern forums: they fixed a system that wasn't broken as far as discourse goes. When I was in high school the were forums where responses were ordered in time rather than by popularity. Those places were actual venues for discussion. Ranking only exists for monetization. If you don't agree with this then consider professional venues for discourse: academic journals. I have never browsed a journal or arxiv by the number of citations or the hindex or whatever.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > This presupposes some kind of universal value function. Yes: "a majority of HN readers of this comment found it useful / not useful". That's the best you're going to get. But for the most part, it does actually work. If 80% of people on the site agree that a comment is useful, that's good enough; it's unreasonable to expect any evaluation of subjective matters to be universal. And that's why moderators will step in and do some manual tweaking if things get very divisive. If that 80% number (that I made up) drops too low, getting too close to 50%, then that means that the discussion just isn't likely to be productive. HN is not a homogeneous group, and sometimes the there isn't a clear majority in agreement. > Here's what I'll say though about modern forums: they fixed a system that wasn't broken as far as discourse goes. When I was in high school the were forums where responses were ordered in time rather than by popularity I don't agree with this. One reason is the lack of threading. phpBB and its contemporaries just had a list of posts, and all replies linearly under each post link. Digging through for the bits you actually care about was a huge pain in the ass, and it's one of the reasons why I never enjoyed fora like that. The other reason is just scale. I'm not sure how old you are, but I was in HS in the late 90s. Back then the internet was much smaller, not as commercialized, and people generally behaved decently well toward each other. We didn't have the spambots we do today, and every forum site wasn't under constant attack by people who want to destroy online communities just for fun. I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was a lot easier to manage communities back then and keep discourse civil and on-topic, with very few automated tools at hand. These days it's pretty much impossible to create high quality discussions at any scale without a ranking system. Sure, you see smaller communities of a few hundred, maybe even a thousand, people where these things work sorta like they did 20+ years ago (but I guarantee you the board itself is doing a ton of automated spam filtering to get you there). HN has... what? Tens of thousands, or likely more than a hundred thousand users. If you enabled showdead in your profile page, you'll see a lot of garbage that gets through the automated filters and ends up flagged out of existence. And even regardless of that, with a community this size, you're going to have enough disagreement on the fundamentals of any complex topic that you're going to get a ton of disagreement. Voting and flagging is far from perfect, but it can help it from devolving into a cesspool of low-effort comments and outright name-calling.
- antepodius 6y ago