One of the most negative habits is in my opinion the failure to read a comment charitably (to make an effort to interpret it in the best possible light). Instead, people often tend to misread or miserunderstand what's being said, only to use the opportunity to write a "correction" based on that false impression. A worse flavor of the same problem is a misunderstanding that is then used to justify outrage or personal annoyance.
That's what I find worthy of being changed, and I will certainly make an effort to read comments more charitably as well.
Overall though, and I realize this is quite anecdotal, rampant negativity - especially about things other members of the community have created - seems to have gotten less common recently.
This comment brings to mind the concept of the the steel man [1][2].
Steelmanning an argument means to go one step further. In addition to selecting the most charitable parts of another person's argument, one seeks to improve on it, by making it the best possible representation of the other persons position.
From there, one can offer their own counterpoint, to this improved version.
[1] https://themerelyreal.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/steelmanning/
[2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/
Theatre Sports (competitive collaborative dramatic improvisation) has the concepts of offer, accept, and block.
Accepting an offer means to build on it in some way, as a real part of the scene - in the way you mean.
A block is when you ignore or undermine the offer, denying it instead of building on it. There's temptation to do so for a cheap laugh. The uncharitable negativity of HN seems similar.
One thing that took me a while to understand as a player - accepting doesn't always mean ignoring conflict. If you offer me something, I accept that your version of reality is true; I don't have to agree with specific parts of it.
For example, if someone starts a scene with "Isn't it lovely to be here in Paris?", I accept that we are in Paris, but I don't have to think it's lovely.
The takeaway from this to non-improv discussions is that I'm more aware of the fact that although I might disagree with the comment someone makes, I accept that the writer has that opinion and that they believe it to be true, and if I want to challenge any part of it then I'm going to have a much better time of it if I start from their version of reality.
Accepting means logging|auditing?
I hope the order in which these comments lead to yours will stay this way in the future. for reference: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xh6gdqlm8jargi4/Screenshot%202015-...
Why? They perfectly highlight what's the "good common-sense reply" is like, how we should measure with each other opinions and how to handle disagreements.
HN might as well included the conversation as an example.
Sounds not dissimilar to the "bid/turn towards/turn away" terminology in Gottman relationship theory.
Log is an act we miss. (Change is act limited by log law.)
The steelmanning combinatorially #buildingmentalhealth and emotional regulation while mods are drone operators hiddren unrestricted violently cutting and copping audit logs to get page views clear for what depth of order of self empowerment determination?
[1] http://web.archive.org/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i... [2] https://archive.today/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9... [3] http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1428133249694151
At the risk of further derailing the thread, I wonder if there might be a more inclusive term than 'steel man' — I don't feel great about using that phrase to describe 'the best possible representation of a position.' (The issue is fresh in my mind, since I stumbled across the gender-neutral alternative 'straw person'[1] this morning.)
[1] http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/2013/18.html, para 21.
I was attacked for being "PC" the last time I used straw person here on HN. I just thought it sounded better, but the poster was adamant that I was responsible for all the ills in society.
Hopefully, this new guideline will avert similar incidents.
Considering how toxic PC people are to debates (ironically exactly because the gratuitus negativity they bring) that is more than a defence mechanism that any healthy community needs to develop to protect itself.
Political correctness should be considered the same as writing a negative comment.
You might get fewer downvotes if you define "PC" and offer some examples so we understand your perspective. Most people who rail against "being PC" are walking pits of gratuitous negativity, so people are probably assuming you're one of them.
PC: Political correctness.
Best example of my head: the developer on Node.js who got haunted to hell because he reversed a change from he to some gender-neutral term. For the feeling of some undefined person Node.js, and I suspect open source in general, lost a good developer.
Other example: after landing a satelite on a rock tens of thousands of miles away the lead of the rocket team is forced to make a tearful apology because is found to wear a shirt with semi-dress women and guns on it. Said shirt being made by his friend, who is a woman.
Other example: dongle gate, github metocracy.
So yeah, a few of these people may, sometimes, have a point, but the community will be much better of if we kick them out on sight.
This seems a bit different from my example: being attacked for using a less common term. In this case, the "PC police" (going by your examples) were the people attacking me because I used a term that offended them.
They attacked you because they assume, incorrectly, that you were one of the PC people, because you used a PC term, not just a less common term. This isn't unreasonable and the cost of letting PC people in is high.
It's not a "PC word." I like the way the word sounds more, so I use it. Word choice is my prerogative as a writer.
It is a PC word. Your choice of word is as you said, your prerogative. How people read it is theirs.
What benefit would that bring? Sure we will be more inclusive to the people who don't understand that steelmanning comes from the (opposite) strawmanning, which comes from strawmen, which have been called so for centuries.
Is a person who gets offended by that really the kind of person you want on HN?
I tried to express my comment in a way that made it clear I wasn't attacking the parent. I realise that 'straw man' is centuries old, like many of the terms that are now coming to be supplanted by inclusive alternatives. Of course using such terms doesn't make you a bad person, but I think we can all benefit from considering the connotations of the words we use. Even if you think the harm caused by non-inclusive language is negligible, in many cases it costs you nothing to use an alternative, so why not do it?
I'll note that straw-man seems very common in language flame wars. Steelmanning in that specific context would tend to make one examine the particular context in which the language is most used and why. Come to think of it, many language discussions would vanish in a puffs of pointlessness if it weren't for the many levels of subtlety with which one can disguise straw-man.
I think you nailed the real problem, which is that people have become so quick to write off anyone who ruffles their feathers at all.
Drew Houston describes the HN feedback he received for Dropbox as all the motivation he needed to keep going. He also explained that he knew it was a hit because of how many people were saying negative things.
Today though, any truly critical comment means you're either a hater or a troll. Every person is either a friend or an enemy. Inside the club or outside the club. You can't sincerely like something, and also be very critical about aspects of it, without instantly transforming into a jealous hater.
Assuming the worst about other people is probably the most negative thing you can do. Everyone is a mixed bag.
Sometimes I like to ask a lot of critical questions because I care and I really like it.
Other times because I'm trying to rip it to shreds. It's probably impossible to tell for someone online which mode I am in.
I would like to say though that as someone who occasionally makes things, I do appreciate proper critique and I do like to hear about different view points.
Voicing legitimate and non-pedantic disagreement in a polite manner is to me one of the major features HN offers, simply because it's a collection of interesting people.
Myself, I don't always agree with the majority opinion either. For example, I disagree with Sam's opinion about AGI, and even though that particular comment was received quite badly, I never meant it to be anything else but an invitation to see things from another perspective.
he knew it was a hit because of how many people were saying negative things
Most get negative reviews, few are hits. The irony is that I've seen that thread and I thought it was generally well-received.
> people often tend to misread or miserunderstand what's being said
This is like the phenomenon examined in this 2005 paper: Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?[1]
From the abstract:
> Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail. [...] this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can.
When we read a HN comment negatively, we should second guess our interpretation of it before we reply. We may not have perceived it the way the author intended.
Likewise when writing comments, we should ask ourselves if our wording might be received more negatively than we realize.
[1] http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/nicholas.epley/krugeretal05....
Another factor, although probably less prominent, is responsiveness. Back when I used to code on a MUD I noticed that conversations on one of the messages boards were much more likely to heat up than chat sessions. Just being able to react and clarify things from one sentence to the next makes a big difference.
I suppose it's possible there's also some sort of face-to-face feel with chat that encourages sympathetic responses.
I'd say social cues are important. When you write in text you're really speaking in the tone and voice of someone's mind - which means their current emotional state, perception of the writer etc.
The only reliable way I've found to make text only social interaction work is basically to be what feels like overly nice. Which manages to average out to a casual conversation in the real world - I think. I mean who knows?
> Instead, people often tend to misread or miserunderstand > what's being said, only to use the opportunity to write a > "correction" based on that false impression.
Part of this issue is what at Stackoverflow was called the "Fastest Gun in the West Problem" [1].
I think a successful strategy on HN is: Write many comments really quickly and take the risk that some of them are bad or even wrong. The incentive for being an early commenter outbalances the penalty for being wrong sometimes.
[1] http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/10/solving-the-fastest-gu...
You are right. I read this somewhere, something along the lines ... that when you disagree with someone, you should first make sure to repeat and restate the arguments of the opponent you disagreeing with, in your own words, before making any of your own arguments.
I've never heard that before, but it's excellent advice. Sometimes I like to come up with the best argument I possibly can against my own beliefs (basically playing devil's advocate with myself) to better understand opposing viewpoints, but this is even better.
Here's one version, from Daniel Dennett:
> How to compose a successful critical commentary:
> 1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
> 2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
> 3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
> 4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/03/28/daniel-den...
I add thoughts here: http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/01/28/links-for-january-2015...
But, are you disagreeing or agreeing with me? LOL, j/k. Things are always so subtle with human communication. It is always fun to watch/see people put down rules to manage the psychology of communication (referring to original thread). But following rules, or have conscious awareness of the least minimum rules (etiquette is a better word) is always so important in having a reasonable environment.
Thanks for sharing that list.
I've seen it put as "steelmanning" an argument, as the opposite of a strawman. A strawman misrepresents the opposing argument to make it weaker; a steelman interprets an argument as strongly as possible before refuting it.
At the very least, I try to phrase feedback as "this is awesome; I particularly like the ability to ... and the approach addressing .... I think it would help to also ...", or similar statements that make it clear what's good before commenting on what could be improved.
It's an excellent list. A little amusing as Dennett's own debating style is a touch more robust than this might suggest. Though in all fairness, if it's him vs. another philosopher of similar standing, both with subtle and complex positions built up over 40+ year careers, working through steps 1 - 3 might lengthen the discussion somewhat.
That reads like some of the mediation or non-violent communication advice I've heard.
The point is that it lets people feel like they've been heard and understood.
I also like the (related) idea of an Ideological Turing Test:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_Turing_Test
That's a really good idea; you shouldn't just be able to restate the opposing argument as a devil's advocate, you should be able to understand all the arguments well enough to make them as effectively as any advocate. And you shouldn't sound like a caricature of that position unless all advocates of that position sound equally ridiculous.
"you shouldn't sound like a caricature of that position unless all advocates of that position sound equally ridiculous"
No, you owe it to yourself to make the best possible argument for the other side's position. It might still sound ridiculous in the end, but you really want to nail it and understand the argument. If for no other reason to expand your thinking on your side.
Sadly, you probably should also understand the sound bites, but that is concession to how the world works and not your own education.
> No, you owe it to yourself to make the best possible argument for the other side's position. It might still sound ridiculous in the end, but you really want to nail it and understand the argument. If for no other reason to expand your thinking on your side.
I think we're saying the same thing. I was suggesting that in some cases, the arguments really don't hold water at all, and there's no way to make them sound otherwise. In which case, if you're attempting to pass a Turing-like test for sounding like someone advocating that position, you're going to sound equally ridiculous.
Sometimes, the best thing to do is repeat someone's ridiculous view back to them. Most of the time, I get "yes, that's correct" back and can be sure there's no point in continuing. Saves time and energy.
I ended a debate with a local firebrand Baptist with a simple question. He insisted atheists are immoral, so I said: "It sounds like you're saying I'm immoral."
"It does sound a little ridiculous when you put it that way. You seem like a decent person, if a little more sinful than average."
Apparently he was so used to talking exclusively to other religious people that he assumed everyone shared the same concept of morality, which for him was tied up in religious law. It didn't occur to him that alternate morality frameworks (like humanism) could exist, so he assumed atheists were immoral.
I used to try to do that.
Then some people were against gay marriage. And I listened to their arguments - or tried to because they literally didn't have a single one based on logic.
So if I was to follow that rule I couldn't critize such people at all.
Which lead me to the following conclusion: all of these rules of debate are excellent when you sit around the tables in Oxford or similar places or the debate is held under the Chatham house rules with a selection process for the invites.
Outside, in the real world, arguments are politics, which is just war fought by other means, and should be treated as such, for the same reason that you end up with defect-defect in the prisoners dilemma.
You end up with defect-defect in the prisoner's dilemma only in theory. In practice, you tend to get mutual cooperation. The prisoner's dilemma is an incomplete picture of human rationality. It assumes you are playing against an agent you can't actually identify with.
That is true, I guess I should have specified that I meant it between entities (people, countries, etc) that really disliked each other.
I think you're right! It's difficult to communicate tone and other 'out of band' stuff through text. This is what Wikipedia's "Assume good faith" guideline is to addresses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith
The corrections I find the most frustrating are the ones that attempt to frame something that is reasonably a difference of opinion as a black/white, right/wrong issue.
A made up example using something that is about as subjective as possible: No, that's wrong, strawberries are awful.
(just changing that to "I disagree, ..." gets rid of a lot of the nonsense)
There also ends up being a lot of what is essentially squabbling, comments going back and forth over what someone meant, or pedantically squishing some point that had done a good enough job of transmitting the idea (I'm all for being careful when it matters, I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter all the time).
The pedantic bickering is brutal because you cannot collapse threads.
The whole site needs rewriting and modernizing. Considering the audience, it's kind of shocking how stale it is.
I'm tempted to chalk that up to HN being, essentially, a pet project implemented in a toy language as a not entirely open source[0] forum maintained by volunteers. Of course, I don't know but that's my guess, that pg just didn't work very hard on polishing up the parts he didn't find personally interesting. For some reason, people seem to be weirdly elitist about HN's layout, and act as if any slight change to the UI is going to allow the barbarians of the internet to storm the gates, until Hacker News is aught but cat memes and ashes.
[0] The language and original forum are, obviously, open source. But AFAIK you can't make pull requests against the code HN is actually running, which has had tons of modifications made to it, because that's special sauce. There used to be a repo for making bug and feature requests but that seems to no longer be active.
Of course, you could roll your own minimalistic threaded forum, but getting people to move from HN anywhere other than lobste.rs[1] (if they want more moderation) or reddit (if they want less) might be difficult, unless you're serving some specific niche like DataTau[2].
[1]https://lobste.rs/
[2]http://www.datatau.com/
Considering the audience you might be right. I'm not a typical audience member. I read in the evening on a phone with a slow 2.5g connection. For that reason I use opera mini. HN works perfectly on it and the combination of the browser and whatever it is HN does for layout means I can load a HN page faster than anything else on the web. It doesn't seem to matter how many comments there are. So I hope it doesn't change. But you are right. I'm not typical.
I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, the looks of HN have helped protect the community against trolls. Everybody knows internet commenting is crude, rude and awful more often than not. In my opinion HN is a glorious example of an online community done right and I'm not sure we should change the site.
But who knows, maybe it will even be better if it gets a little make-over.
Trolls exist on HN, I assure you. They're not scared off by the simplicity of the layout.
They exist but they are not that many. The spartan layout might be one reason.
There might be a correlation, but I doubt it's a strong one. Maybe there just aren't that many unique accounts here, and this isn't a particularly mainstream site. There are reasons to be turned off of Hacker News that go beyond the layout.
Imageboards can have pretty low-tech and annoyingly obtuse UX as well but trolls adapt and abound because there are no user accounts and they know they have an audience. Most of the trolling I think i've seen here has been done through throwaway accounts, so who knows whether or not those are sockpuppets of existing accounts or people showing up from /g/ to have some fun?
I think features can benefit the individual without damaging the community. For example, AJAX enabled replies would leave me in the place I was reading, rather than taking me back to the top of the page, requiring me to hit 'back' twice after every comment. It would be nice if the 'next' link always worked too, instead of just throwing an error if you're browsing too slowly.
Email replies are covered by HN Notify, which, while hacky, does the job. It would be nice to have a simple Reddit-style red envelope, though, rather than clicking my username, then 'Comments' to see if I've had replies.
Of course, there are people who will say, "How much effort is it to click the back button?" but the irony is that these are exactly the kind of bad UX choices that the HN community would criticize any "Show HN" for.
I find the dissuasion away from multiple levels of replies as though in-depth discussion is a bad thing to be bewildering. Comments like "Replying here because I can't reply deeper" shouldn't need to exist. Apparently it's to prevent arguments, but collapsible comments would hide away anything you don't want to follow further.
"It would be nice to have a simple Reddit-style red envelope, though, rather than clicking my username, then 'Comments' to see if I've had replies."
I agree that a notification of replies would be useful. Small tip, instead of clicking your username then clicking on comments, which is something I did for a long time too, just click on the threads link at the top of the page. Takes you to the same content, but in one click rather than two.
I'm not sure what made reddit turn so bad (and I mostly mean the default subreddits and the subscribers rather than the site itself) but I hope that some care is taken to avoid it. HN is a breath of fresh air compared to reddit and I would endure a lot of bad UX if it helped keep it that way.
> I'm not sure what made reddit turn so bad
Popularity, I guess. It became a very general interest site that covers a wide range of interests, and therefore appeals to an equally wide range of visitors -- including those with, shall we say, poor taste and etiquette. HN, on the other hand, is largely centered around the working programmer, a group of people who, for the most part, are looking for something interesting rather than memetic jibber jabber.
The site in general is good, but the user moderation system is utterly awful. A 'disagree' mod double-functions as a censor, and there's no need because there's also a separate flagging system. My profile page has a bit of a rant about the shortcomings of the mod system here with more detail.
The autodetection algorithms probably need tweaking as well - from time to time I see users with polite comment histories mysteriously getting shadowbanned. Sometimes another user will look into it and post a comment to that effect, but without a user-to-user messaging system or a method to reply to dead comments, there's no guarantee that a shadowbanned user will see a friendly message.
Not only does it censor, it gives some people undue power. A few days ago, I commented on a now flagkilled post. Within a couple of hours, some 15-20 other people had commented on it, and each and every post, except mine, was grayed out from downvotes. I had gotten a downvote too, but I had enough votes to counterbalance the briagading. I read the other comments, but did not notice anything nasty or disrespectful in there.
This abuse of power is ruining the system for those who have new accounts or only post occasionally.
I would like to put the downvote to rest. The upvote seems like it would be sufficient? The better comments rise to the top. The lesser comments are left at the bottom.
I've noticed a big improvement since dang took off the invisibility cloak. All the famous attempts at replacing HN tried to solve community problems technologically (like public referral trees and user-based discussions), but they all fall short of just having a visible and active moderator.
It also helps that dang has been willing - eager, even - to issue a mea culpa and reverse a decision. In other words, he's willing to admit to mistakes, or if not mistakes, at least sincere and reasoned discussion. This goes a long way. He doesn't just say, "Hey, I decided, you live with it."
"the looks of HN have helped protect the community against trolls."
Trolls just use the add-ons. Trolls will put in effort that normal users would not. A lot of online communities design based on the idea that trolls are lazy, and I think that has not served us well.
That's true if you assume that every feature moves the community forward. But not all of them do; many features regress us. For instance: unlike on Reddit, there's no indication when someone's responded to one of your questions. As a result, very few arguments last more than a few hours here.
I'm particularly leery of collapsible threads, although my understanding is we're about to get them anyways.
> I'm particularly leery of collapsible threads
May I ask why? As someone who considers that the one change/improvement I'd like to see on HN I'm curious what there is to be leery of that I may not have considered.
Because this isn't like reddit where the most upvoted comments are elevated in otherwise collapsed threads. I've only read some of the most insightful and interesting comments and discussions on HN buried most of the way down the page because they were available for me to see despite their lack of being voted on. On HN, popularity isn't valuable, the ideas are, and non-precollapsed threads support that.
Sometimes the good stuff isn't even on the first page. For example, see [0] (scroll down to the follow up) and the HN discussion [1] referenced there. Also, collapsible threads doesn't have to mean pre-collapsed threads.
To me it seems like collapsible threads would help, not harm, in this case because more people would have collapsed the OT first thread and participated in the discussion about the actual topic. I realize there are two assumptions built in to the above that may not always be true: 1) OT threads are bad or less desirable and 2) more people in a discussion is better.
0 http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2012/03/29/a-womans-story.ht... 1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3772292
I'd argue that the main point of collapsible (not pre-collapsed) threads is to support what you're saying. When a comment spawns several pages of discussion on a topic you're not interested it, collapsing it would let you go directly to the next comment you are interested in, surely?
Right now, for me at least I often just scroll down to the next top-level comment because it's a bother to find the end of a comment tree that started several indentations in.
I use Reddit Enhancement Suite to collapse all child comments by default, then open interesting top-level comments in a new tab to read the full discussion. I probably miss a lot of good discussion on HN because it doesn't support something similar.
> Because this isn't like reddit where the most upvoted comments are elevated in otherwise collapsed threads.
HN supporting collapsible threads doesn't mean automatically collapsing threads.
That concern could easily be remedied by having thread collapsing be an optional setting in your account. I personally think having every thread collapse after a certain depth would make it much easier to tell which threads are probably worth looking deeper into.
very few arguments last more than a few hours here.
Very few posts last more than a few hours here :)
There have been times where I've gone to bed, then checked HN in the morning, and some huge issue or release has happened, there's a quality thread with hundreds of comments, and it's largely inactive because everyone's had their say already, so they're not checking for new stuff.
I'm not supporting reply alerts as I also think they'll do more harm than good, just noting that posts come and go pretty quickly.
I'm subscribed to HN Notify, and personally, while I admit I sometimes use it to carry on unproductive arguments, I also often get replies that are positive or neutral in tone and contribute more information to the discussion; since they're replies to me and to whatever specific point I commented on, I'm generally interested in reading them even if the version of the entire discussion I originally read did a decent job of covering the topic. (Actually, scrolling through a list of my HN Notify emails, it seems non-negative replies are by far the most common case. I don't remember them as such, probably because involved arguments stand out more than random bits of discussion.) Therefore, I'm glad to have the service, and I'm skeptical that it would really be so bad to give it to users who aren't savvy enough to know that HN Notify exists.
Counterpoint: unless you are on HN all the time it is often impossible to get answer to a question because the post is a few hours old.
Worse: There is no point in comming back and edit you post with sources because by that time nobody is going to see it.
Disaster: There is no benefit to writing a thoughful, well sourced comment in the first place because nobody will read it by the time you are done.
I disagree. A lot of HN's character and culture are a result of how unmodern/unconventional it is.
For example, not being able to get reply updates by email means you have to come back to the site to check, for example. Is that good or bad? I don't know the answer, but it selects a different audience. A modern HN would be a different HN community and culture.
It is actually possible to get e-mail notifications via this external service: http://hnnotify.com/
However, that still makes it a conscious choice to engage with the service that way - the default way is still checking back, and that shapes the general usage patterns of the site, even if some people have concluded it benefits them more to modify their experience.
Yes, good point.
Check out the Hacker News Enhancement Suite for Chrome.
Comment collapsing and new comment highlighting are both excellent reasons to use the extension.
Always interpreting what was said to him in the most intelligent light is the distinguishing behavior of my favorite professor from grad school. If people are constantly correcting you on jumping to the wrong conclusion, and telling you they actually meant something else, then you are not as smart as you think you are in that context. (Yes, this is indeed related to Dunning-Kruger!)
On the other hand, my favorite professor would often come out with an interpretation of what someone said that was levels more intelligent than what was said. Then the reaction would be surprise or even delight on the part of the other. (Sometimes, I think this was a deliberate tactic to keep the conversation on a higher level.)
One of the smartest men I've ever met.
rampant negativity...seems to have gotten less common recently
HN does do a good job of weeding out uselessly negative comments and other trolling behavior. If you want proof of that, go to your profile and turn on "Show Dead". It is amazing to see how many people are shadow banned yet continue to post on a daily basis. I've seen several accounts that have posted daily for years completely unaware nobody is seeing anything they post. They know nobody has ever upvoted or downvoted their comment or replied to it but just can't seem to make the connection that they're shadow banned.
> I've seen several accounts that have posted daily for years completely unaware nobody is seeing anything they post.
I may be in the minority here, but I do not consider this a good result for anyone.
Agreed. Wish there was a way to upvote dead comments that I liked to contribute to their status being reconsidered.
Soon there will be!
That's a wonderful change to consider, thank-you.
I've noticed the opposite. I browse with showdead on, and roughly half the time I'm left to wonder what on earth transgression the person committed to merit being silenced in that way after examining their comment history.
I browse with showdead on as well. A lot of the time it does hit the target. Other times someone appears to be shadowbanned from only a couple of snarky comments a while back but before and after were polite. Occasionally it hits people that have only ever been polite, and I'm left scratching my head.
Such a problem could always be solved by phrasing your response as a question.
"No, it's actually this way" vs "Have you considered the possibility that it's this way?" carries the same information with drastically different results.
Yup. Not just comments, always trying to find the alleged negative aspects of everything and clinging only onto that, without so much as acknowledging other possibilities.
This is the reason I stopped reading HN as much, just as I stopped reading comments everywhere else on the internet. I don't want to tiptoe through arguments trying to preventively push aside all possible misinterpretations or people trying to put words in my mouth.
This is not critical thinking, this is just cynic criticism.
I don't mind the negativity on HN and sometimes it's even helpful if I can avoid getting upset, but the negative comments on Amazon really make it hard to decide what to buy.
One of the most negative habits is in my opinion the failure to read a comment charitably (to make an effort to interpret it in the best possible light
I don't even want charitable interpretation necessarily—I just want close reading and reasonably deep understanding of the topic! For example, the top reply to this comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8941152 totally misses the plot.
Looking through my recent comment history, though, I'm impressed at the overall quality of the responses.
Agreed. This really got on my nerves a few weeks ago and I couldn't resist going meta (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9013259). There's even a Wikipedia article on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
Your posting of this a little while back has caused me to think to myself "Geez, 'Principle of charity' would be useful here" over and over and over since you originally posted that. Really useful name to put to a concept like that. So. Thanks!
There's a well established social phenomena for what you describe as uncharitable reading the words / actions of other people. It's called the fundamental attribution error.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
It has been studied in detail with respect to computer mediated communications as far back as the dawn of email and the tendency of readers to assign a lot more negativity to the emails they receive then their senders ever intended.
Yes I can count with one hand the people that consistently uses the Principle of Charity.
And the saddest part is not seeing the interlocutor full of himself and completely ignoring the fact that, by not using this principle, he makes his own argument weaker (showing that his intelligence didn't reached those heights).
The saddest part is the public false victory because depending on the peers (audience), he will likely be perceived as in a stronger position when the opposite is true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
This goes both ways. If I think someone has misinterpreted me, I usually apologize for being unclear and clarify my statement. I would rather clear it up than start a flamewar, even if someone else might be itching for one.
Why should I try to interpret comments in the best possible light? I could make an effort to interpret them in the worst possible light, too. I have no reason to believe that internet commenters mean well.
The issue is really with speed of judgement. It's all too easy to become close minded after judging something, especially when judging something negatively. The key is remaining open minded as long as possible to take in more information, then you're in a better place to judge. Disagreement in a respectful manner is a reflection of how you've balanced the positive and negative, if you prejudge Internet commenters you'll have made it much harder on yourself to find that balance.
> Why should I try to interpret comments in the best possible light?
Because doing so contributes to the community and not doing so harms it.
When you respond to the strongest interpretation of a comment, you're responding to what's most substantive in it. That raises the signal/noise ratio for everybody, and curiosity is what we're trying to optimize for.
There is a different between the "strongest" interpretation of a comment and the "best possible light".
For example, if somebody tells me "Angersock, you can go happily fuck yourself", I'm not going to expect them to be wishing me a rousing and cheerful round of masturbation--that is the "best possible light", but not the "strongest interpretation".
Properly handled, assuming the worst of a comment, articulating the argument you think is being made, and then rebutting it, is far better than just assuming the best--provided it's done civilly, of course.
You're responding to a pretty weak interpretation of what we're talking about here. :) The point is to address the strongest plausible interpretation of what another is saying. It's pretty well-established what the Principle of Charity means [1]. (By the way, you can see from [2] that there's an ongoing discussion about formalizing it for HN.)
I don't think it's a stretch, mutatis mutandis, to take even a comment like "go fuck yourself" charitably. It could, indeed probably mostly does, mean "I'm angry about something unrelated."
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
2. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20principle%20of%2...
Since "you can happily go fuck yourself" is not in fact an argument, the principle of charity does not demand that you interpret it as anything more than a rude interjection. At its strongest, it would require you to assume that the commenter was legitimately upset and deeply invested in the argument, which would perhaps keep you from responding in kind.
> At its strongest, it would require you to assume that the commenter was legitimately upset and deeply invested in the argument
I don't think even at its strongest the PoC would require you to assume that the commenter was legitimately upset, only that the commenter was intending to express that they were upset.
The PoC only applies to interpreting what the intended message is, not to conclusions about its justification as would be necessary to support the interpretation that the commenter was legitimately upset.
I can't help but suggest that your pretty nitpicky distinction between "interpret[ing] in the best possible light" and "rebutting the argument you think is being made" is, perhaps, not interpreting the argument for the guideline in the best possible light.
Because HN has an international audience where English is often a second language; also cultural expectations can be markedly different to the US.
This is a much larger factor on HN than I think most people realize.
Even within the US.
Pedantic "corrections" that offer no additional value are seen as pretty contemptible behavior in real life, so you probably shouldn't make a habit of it.
This is either a non sequitur or a wildly uncharitable read of the remark you're replying to.
A bigger project than HN that has put a lot of time into the norm we're talking about today is Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith
That actually came from the original C2 Wiki, although it's been refactored (across sites apparently...it's now on MeatBall) significantly since I first came across it c. 2003:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AssumeGoodFaith
I suspect it's a much older idea than that, probably dating back to the Enlightenment. It's closely related to the Principle of Charity, which was coined in 1958 but again, refers to a much older principle of logical discourse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
> That actually came from the original C2 Wiki
That's fascinating! Has anyone traced it to its precise origin there? I'd love to see that.
Here's the obvious link to Archive.org ('02):
http://web.archive.org/web/20020502092511/http://www.usemod....
I think the Principle of Charity is pretty spot on for 1958. I suspect John Rawls said something assuming good faith, too, given the quotes I've found [1]:
In his book A Theory of Justice, Rawls stated that citizens are obliged to act in good faith, and to assume good faith on the part of others until clear proof emerges to the contrary. They must recognize, in effect, that the system cannot meet everybody's claims at once and accept that at times they will be on the losing side.
And a good recent blog post [2]:
Several maxims guided me in doing this. I always assumed, for example, that the writers we were studying were always much smarter than I was. If they were not, why was I wasting my time and the students’ time by studying them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed they saw it too and must have dealt with it, but where? So I looked for their way out, not mine.
[1] http://www.rbc.com/aboutus/letter/may_jun1995.html
[2] https://parentheticalpilgrim.wordpress.com/2015/03/14/good-f...
Think about the possible outcomes:
Wrongly assume the best: It quickly becomes apparent, things move forward, you may even steer things in a better direction.
Wrongly assume the worst: You look like a jerk, possibly demotivated people or made them feel bad, and now there is an air of conflict that needs to be ventilated by unnecessarily defensive comments.
Because the failure conditions are worse.
Let's see, here are the possibilities:
1. Someone means well, you interpret it as them meaning well and respond accordingly. Everything is fine and dandy, everyone's happy. 2. Someone means well, and you interpret them as meaning ill, and respond accordingly. Now you are angry for no reason, they have had the experience of making a well meaning comment and being shot down for it. Everyone is miserable. 3. Someone means ill, and you interpret it as them meaning ill, and respond accordingly. Now they have gotten the thrill of getting through to you (remember, they mean ill, so that is their intent), and you are angry (for a good reason). You've made yourself miserable and a troll happy. 4. Someone means ill, and you interpret it as them meaning well and respond accordingly. Now they don't get the pleasure of having bothered you, you have shrugged it off an it's not great loss to you. You are now happier than option 3, and they haven't had a chance to hurt you like they meant to.
Of course, real life isn't quite a simple as that; but that does cover a very large number of possible interactions on the internet. By biasing yourself toward the most charitable interpretation of others comments, you reduce the risk of a simple misunderstanding leading to everyone being unhappy, reduce the risk of just giving a troll exactly what they want, and contribute to a more positive environment in general.
It really does help out in an awful lot of cases, and reduces friction dramatically if you always assume good faith unless you have very compelling evidence to the contrary.
Generous interpretations raise discourse. Because they're attempts to find strong versions of positions.
However, it takes two to tango; worthwhile discussion is a cooperative venture. There's systematic reasons why a forum is incapable of reaching a certain level. Take Twitter and misogyny. (Or HN for that matter; Twitter's rampant death threats shouldn't lower expectations when evaluating other forums.)
Because if your goal is learn something in a dialogue, not win internet points, you'll want to understand the strongest version of someone's argument -- which isn't necessarily what they wrote verbatim.
Let's assume for the sake of simplicity that the debate concerns a non-subjective question, so it has a right answer, only it is unknown which it is.
The best outcome for HN is if we as a community converge on the right answer.
Now if someone brings argues poorly, but for the right answer, and then someone comes along and crushes the poor argument. Then the counter-arguer "wins" and succeeds in humiliating the "opponent". But the the wrong answer wins, and that is bad for the community
If on the other hand, someone comes along, reinforces the poor argument, and then brings a weak counterargument, then that gives the right answer a better chance of winning.
> One of the most negative habits is in my opinion the failure to read a comment charitably
More generally - the failure to r e a d the article/parent comment etc.
(People who disagree with me seems particularly prone to this :-P )
Sadly it's spawned by the rampant ignorance most intellectual people face on a daily basis. This creates a cynicism and impulsive reaction to "check off" that perspective without vetting it further. This will be a good case study in guidelines that defy human behavior. It is tendency for many to go against this policy, which is why it was begat. Interesting how Y Combinator is wanting to thwart group think I welcome the spike.
Yes, there are parts of this community very uncomfortable with things they do not understand or agree with, and are very quick to argue or dismiss rather than try and see the value of the contribution or different point of view. Reddit went through the same shift as it became more popular.
There is hope: one of my best received comments was a gentle chiding of someone who had belittled someone's comment.
Another issue is that text is quite poor at conveying tone, both on HN and elsewhere. Saw something recently about adding emoji's for tone.
A related issue is people downvoting comments that they haven't properly comprehended. Instead of asking "why do you think x" or "do you mean x" they just downvote the comment. Sometimes it happens with controversial comments, even when the controversial comment is based on facts. Sometimes going against HN groupthink (e.g. saying something bad about libertarianism) results in downvotes.
EDIT: I'm surprised that I got a downvote on this comment. I think that illustrates the problem.
> EDIT: I'm surprised that I got a downvote on this comment. I think that illustrates the problem.
I think it illustrates the problem with "sometimes UI elements get clicked without intent" and "HN has no way to undo up/downvotes".
In fact, I can say that with authority, since I was the one who made the accidental click.
This seems not to be the only reason:
There seems to be a consistent tendency that some people downvote comments not because the comments are wrong but because accepting the comment would undermine their position/opinion. See anything that touches into google/apple/feminism
Off topic, but the idea that the HN "groupthink" is libertarian seems ridiculous to me... Other than the NSA stuff which is superficially libertarian, I don't see it at all.
The prevailing attitude here is sort of vague lefty-"liberal", basically what you'd expect from, well, a bunch of college students and recent graduates who don't take politics too seriously and live in places like SF and NYC.
I'm talking about things like not wanting to be searched at the airport, not wanting any NSA surveillance or spying, not wanting copyright theft to be illegal, etc. Libertarian seems a more correct word to describe these positions than liberal, as the common theme is distrust of authority.
I find it a little ironic that your comment was downvoted, even though your comment was a very reasonably presented and valid opinion. I just upvoted you. Another example of the problem with the downvote button.
IMO there is no need at all for a downvote button -- it just causes more problems than it ever solves. Much better to just have a 'flag' button for abusive/inappropriate comments, and an upvote button.
I'm surprised that I got a downvote on this comment. I think that illustrates the problem.
Sometimes when I've said something perfectly reasonable and then gotten downvoted, I've realized that in fact my statement was unclear and liable to be misunderstood. The downvotes have helped me to write more clearly, and they're more charitable than rude rejoinders.
[I didn't downvote you. Your statements were perfectly reasonable to me.]