points by dang 6 years ago

You guys are assuming that downvotes and flags are only because of political disagreement. That's part of it, but plenty of downvotes and flags are because users feel a comment broke the site guidelines and they're trying to protect the community for substantive discussion. I routinely downvote and flag comments that I agree with politically, because protecting the commons comes first. What good does it do to strike a fiery blow for your cause if you crack the container in the process?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively than any polling is reporting. Also a shocking amount of support for Chinese governance.

The perceptions of 'skew' that you're experiencing are fraught with cognitive bias. Whatever side you're on in any divisive topic, I guarantee you that the opposite side has exactly the opposite perceptions—that is, they strongly believe that HN and its moderators skew the other way. Here's a small sample from a long list:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17197581

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032682

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23429442

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351311

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342402

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23396632

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21368961

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21461976

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627676

Ironically, the reason these commenters have exactly the opposite perceptions is that they have exactly the same cognitive biases. It seems we all have them. In fact, they're so powerful that one can basically infallibly predict someone's political leanings from the complaints they post about HN skewing the opposite way.

What are these biases? There are at least three.

One is that we are more likely to notice and assign greater weight to things that we dislike. Pain makes a deeper impression than pleasure. A bee sting is more memorable than a field of butterflies. Two or three bee stings and you will be convinced forever that the site is skewed toward bees. I've written about this many times—it's really the dominant dynamic on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Unfortunately nobody realizes that it's the dominant dynamic, so nobody questions their own perceptions of skew, so they come into the commons feeling surrounded by enemies, regardless of what's actually going on there.

A second bias is that people assume that HN is like the rest of the internet when in fact it has the unusual property of being non-siloed, meaning we're all in one big room together. This has the effect of making a site which is in reality more coexistent feel like instead like it's worse and more conflictual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.

A third bias is that we have so little information about each other from small blobs of internet text, so we connect the dots and fill in the blanks to create a picture of who we're dealing with. Unfortunately, because we curve-fit the picture with material drawn from our own imagination, we end up recreating our own demons: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

I puzzled over this for years: why do internet commenters have such a perfect ability to push all my buttons and drive me crazy? Eventually I realized: the only person who knows where all my buttons are is me. I'm experiencing other people as an evil-genius button-pushing nemesis because I'm creating that picture of them. Everywhere we encounter opposition or conflict, and lack objective information to check our perceptions, we're prone to recreating and re-experiencing our own shadow. Other people are doing exactly the same. What does this mean? It means that we're a forum of demons experiencing other demons.

Thus it's a wonder that this place survives at all, and it may destroy itself before long. The intention on HN, from the beginning, has been to try to stave that fate off for as long as we can: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

I don't know what to do about this, other than try to clearly explain the dynamics to people. I guess the model is that if enough of us can gain enough awareness of how these biases are at work in ourselves, we can get a little freer, and a little more able to help fellow community members with that same process. At that point maybe one would start to see a social effect. I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of this model actually working, as of yet.