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He links it at the end, life imitating art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49817280
See here’s the thing - to get the ability to downvote / flag articles, you have to say stuff in public enough times to get the 200 (400?) karma to unlock that. Well, how do you get that karma? You say the things that people on that site want to hear so they click upvote. Spot the curricular bias problem? It was intentionally designed this way.
I’m not sure there is a better way - all the user moderation approaches I’ve seen involve leaning on the regulars to spot stuff. The alternative is dedicated moderators which tends to lead to it’s own problems. I don’t think you want to rely on those who have just signed up as that would be open to abuse pretty quickly.
I always liked old slashdot. The meta moderation system applied to reddit like moderators would be an interesting experiment allowing the community to police the moderators…
You have to manage this carefully. It makes sense to give regulars more power. Take this little community here: You have some power users who have been here for years, who are posting high quality links and high quality posts with many upvotes. It makes sense to give them more upvoting power than some random new account from some new instance. This is something that reddit is struggling with and I suspect Lemmy is too or will be: It’s easy to setup a bot network of a few hundreds or thousands of accounts. They do not need to post, simply up- or downvoting certain topics will help to drown certain stories. The best stories here will gain ~600 upvotes, so just a few hundred accounts will give you the ability to manipulate what is showing up. And favoring older, highly-upvotes accounts is a way to prevent this.
(if you take a look at reddit, you’ll see where this is going: Old account get sold. There are karma-farming bots. Some communities are simply banning new accounts without Karma from posting in order to get the spam in check. Others are invite only)
But “want to hear” on HN is sometimes just intelligent or interesting comments, not necessarily bias confirming…
I think HN is one of the most rigged websites I encountered.
Some posts there look clearly botted regarding the score.
Not a single soul can tell me that it’s normal that the 345th “new AI model”-post get’s 1k upvotes within like 3 hours while articles like “I can steal Mastercard transactions” barely have 800 after an entire day.
In my experience, AI has ruined HN. There used to be a lot of articles that weren’t technology related on the front page. Philosophy, art, history, geography, lots of cool things that were interesting to intellectuals. Now it’s probably 80% AI stories. I’m struggling justify leaving it in my RSS reader.
I’ve also noticed the HN community has been on an accelerating train of lower quality discussion since some time before COVID.
Some of the community has always had a bit of a silicon valley libertarian brain rot, but it used to be balanced out by the open source crowd and just normal professional engineers across the world. The latter demographics have mostly evaporated leaving some of the most braindead takes completely unchallenged, until they’ve become the only noise in the room.
It’s a bit of a shame really, because it used to be a pretty good resource for keeping on top of the comings and goings of the software engineering industry. Combined with Reddit shitting the bed just after COVID, I’ve yet to actually find a decent replacement for what I got out of browsing it, really. Here does a fairly decent job, but as with many subjects, the breadth of content and opinions isn’t quite the same.
Perhaps I need to give Mastodon another go despite not really enjoying microblog social media as a format in general (any recs for follows are greatly appreciated)
It’s funny and sad how many people that consider themselves apolitical and above the quarrels of the left and the right are completely oblivious to how they let the political devils pipeline bias straight into their brain.
And how people that consider themselves centrist seem to have a genuine hate against anything actually centrist. Centrism today is anything from market liberalism and rightwards straight into fascism it seems.
They use excuses like this:
The flagged comments given as examples are exactly the type I don’t want to see here. Not because they are wrong (they are not), but because they are boring, low-calorie declarations of obvious that add very little value to the topic at hand.
They see rhemselves as people who should only have to read what they deem as intellectual conversations.
And that stems from the HN rules.
It’s all designed to shut down progressives.
It’s quite common to reinforce the idea that they are just talking about objective truth while “the others” are being confused by emotions. While they are having a most agreeable circle jerk on right wing talking points wrapped in pandering to their ego.
That site has always been the feckless asshole version of Slashdot.
It always rubbed me like it was 4chan trying to be presentable, and I could never figure out why.
Agree with all of this, but why then does the author stay on HN? It’s as with Xitter, at some point staying on the platform makes you complicit.
Depends on when you read HN. Right now, I see a fierce debate about the evils of AI at the top. On the one hand there are folks defending AI and dreaming of the end of human labour, pointing at Wall-E as a utopia. On the other hand, there are others pointing out that the ultra-rich in the tech industry have openly expressed a desire to build a techno-feudalism with themselves living as kings, while the masses die in unemployed squalor.
Currently there is an interesting discussion of Georgism with 300+ comments. Not exactly a right wing subject…
Maybe not now, but noted right wing economist Milton Friedman was a supporter of LVT.
It’s pack full of gouhls
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