He links it at the end, life imitating art: 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 remember on stack overflow in order to add a comment with a critical addendum to a question someone else asked, I needed to scrounge around and beg for rep like a second class citizen. Eventually I gave up and posted my addendum as a question with a link to the original, then got in trouble with the mods. I told the mods what the fuck and they added the comment for me under their name. Eventually I earnt enough points to speak; which was then retracted when they increased the minimum rep required to comment again.

Made me boycott that website forever

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.

I used to read HN and find interesting stuff, but stopped when it became ever more flooded with startups and AI this.

In its place I have the RSS feed from lobsters, which surfaces plenty of interesting articles.

I read both, though lobsters seems to have more useful content lately. I would like to join so I ask comment/ask questions, but don’t know anyone there to ask.

I can invite you if you DM me your email! I don’t use lobsters super often since I mainly use Lemmy but I do have an account there

I chat in their IRC chatroom occasionally but idk how to turn that into an invite like their about page says <.<

Simply ask for invitation.

I’ll be chattin’ in there and some person will pop in and be like “can I have an invite? can I have an invite?” and the vibe I always got was that it was unwelcome

Couldn’t immediately find an RSS feed there, does it require an account?

Not sure how I found it, but the “top stories” feed is lobste.rs/top/rss

It does require an account with invitation to comment and upvote

Modern sites like to hide their RSS feeds. There are browser addons that show you the feeds - highly recommended

Lobsters manages an okay community (caveat: from what I’ve seen), but their lack of particularly strong rules or guidelines (just as with HN) don’t give me a ton of confidence in their ability to handle value conflict. Following, they don’t really state their community values anyway, which is something I find increasingly important.

Also with respect to the feedback cycles from hiding progressive comments that has been posed; I see a similar thing happening with these invite-only platforms. You are less likely to have diverse opinions and viewpoints from a userbase that largely grows only from the people in the same degree as existing users.

I’ve written about that last part before, and I’d like to stress that’s as neutral an appraisal I can proffer; I think for some communities that is an ideal model, but for many others it would be stifling.

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.

I’d assume because there’s no alternative that’s good enough.

HN has its problems, but it’s still worthwhile if you can ignore the politics and focus on technical discussions.

Technical people ignoring the politics and focusing on technical discussions is like… the whole problem.

I disagree, it’s ok for forums to have a focus. Hacker News has always been focused on tech and startups

Sure, but if your focus has political ramifications that you’re ignoring… Well, the Nuremberg defence didn’t work either.

I don’t think he is on HN actually

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.

Anoþer issue is defining what “political” topics are. Is AI a political topic? It’s certainly an eþical one, and as soon as someone politicizes it ("super intelligence") it becomes one. Co-opting is also a problem for everyone: you used to be able to like red baseball caps wiþout making a political statement.

Lots of stuff is apolitical until someone makes it political. Omarchy is, I þink, a good example. I’m certain a lot of people liked and like it wiþouy agreeing wiþ DHH’s politics, and now feel conflicted about using it. I know I feel þat way about Framework, and Mullvad, alþough þose are more clear because if you’re giving þem money you’re only one degree from financially supporting people you may not want to.

Edit: to be clear, I’m not contradicting Drew’s position, nor am I implying HN is just talking about tech which has been politicized. I re-read my comment and it could easily be interpreted þat way. I agree wiþ Drew about HN; I was just considering it in context of my sites and projects, to which I’ve been adding “no JS” and “human written” banners - and wondering if I’m making a political or expressing an apolitical opinion about some technologies. I feel as if it’s þe latter.

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)

I really want to enjoy Mastodon, I truly do. But my experience has been that it is a living doom spiral by 95% of posting users on there. I learn a lot, but it also drags me towards a highly negative thought pattern and mini-existential crises. I still occasionally review it for the information, but it’s like watching an episode of “This is Us” knowing that I’m going to cry multiple times by opening this pandora’s box. Lemmy has been a lot more varied. Still deeply disturbing news, some weirdness from the .ml crowd, but overall I’m much happier here even if it’s bc my feeds sandwich disturbing news with memes for the dumb caveman brain that’s using this site.

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.

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.

Politics and society are bifurcating, and Hacker News is taking the fork on the right. “Apolitical” is an excuse to favor the status quo, a resistance to change, and therefore a re-enforcement of the existing biases and power structures of society.

Quote of the day right there.

People in positions of privilege very often tell on themselves when they dismiss anything that challenges their worldview as “political,” and therefore inappropriate for whatever “no politics, please” forum they’re in. It doesn’t mean they’re stupid, but it does mean they’re stunted. They would be better leaders if they had broader horizons.

Years ago, in the early 20-teens, I had posted on HN in protest to some new web property that aimed to tie yet another aspect of life to cell phones. I said something like “I work in software but I still don’t have a cell phone, I don’t like them, I don’t want one, I don’t want yet another aspect of modern life to encourage dependence on some subscription service like a phone.” Which was all true.

This attracted rather more reaction than anything else I posted on there. The reactions fell into a few categories:

1. I don’t believe you, liar, why would you post this
2. I have no sympathy for you, loser, go buy a phone
3. Fuck you

Any illusion I had that the HN people were software-loving geeks like me kind of dissolved after that, and I stopped visiting. I suppose that’s exactly what they wanted.

Doesn’t internet require a subscription service?..

My library has free access, as do any number of local business and location. And I once lived in a building that bundled internet/TV service for every resident.

You would weep at the coat the library pays to provide that service. It certainly isn’t cheap. Free…so long as you ignore your taxes.

My taxes paying for library Internet is a lot better than my taxes paying to bomb Iranian schoolchildren.

Way to miss the point.

Yes, it kinda does! Isn’t that crummy?

It’s pack full of gouhls

Another article of Drew Devault grasping straws. For example he picks out this quote when trying to diminish Paul Graham:

Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don’t think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.

I literally don’t see what’s wrong with this quote. Paul Graham is referencing identity politics, virtue signaling, and other behaviors that were definitely common before, and are still fairly common today.

It’s easy: “Woke” and “political correctness” are words that are not really used by left-wing people. There are only a few lefties who would call themselves “woke” or who would advocate for “political correctness”. Those words, however, have been taken over by right-wing conservatives and are used broadly to bash the other side. So if somebody is using that like Paul Graham here is doing, you know that he has a right-wing-conservative world view. Just because using “woke” as a category is nothing somebody progressive left-wing would do.

In case anyone reading this is wondering if @muelltonne@feddit.org and Drew DeVault are imagining meanings behind these words, you can go and read the entire article:

paulgraham.com/woke.html

In context, it is clear that Paul Graham regards any public protest for social justice to be performative and born from a need to feel morally superior to others. “Racism […] is a genuine problem”, but you are only ever allowed to “quietly” help marginalized groups. His examples for the birth of “wokeness” are people starting to report sexual harassment and racist language. Paul is very mad that people told him it’s not ok to call black people “negros” and it shows plainly in his writing.

He does not give one example of what would be a real racist thing that you are allowed to get mad and vocal about. He does not give one example of proper not-“woke” activism. This is the telltale sign of a fascist pretending to be a moderate worried about the “intolerant left”. Social justices exist, but I won’t name a single one. Helping minorities is good, but every time I see it happen it’s bad and I’m going to call it out.

I never said Paul Graham was a progressive left wing? Also that’s the exact identity politics that I was alluding to. Categorizing people and then making large assumptions on the meaning of their words based on the categorization.

As I mentioned in another comment, “Woke” can simply mean “people who virtue signal but don’t bother to engage with the issues deeply”, and with that definition Paul Graham’s quote makes perfect sense

Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.

Anyone who uses “the woke” to describe people who give a shit about that sort of thing can safely be ignored.

Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.

Let me translate this bit:

"Instead of ignoring systemic problems and quietly helping those being hurt by the systemic injustices, reasonable people focused on getting racists in trouble because they choose to continue to be shitheads using slurs’

How do you know what he means by “woke”? I read it as “people who virtue signal and don’t actually care”

Let me translate this bit:

your interpretation, not necessarily what he meant

How do you know what he means by “woke”

Because I have a brain with functional memory and basic pattern recognition. The only people who use “woke” like that are using it to cover for what they really want to say. I’ve seen this plenty of times from MANY right wing shitheads, so if he uses their vernacular, he gets painted with the same brush.

I read it as “people who virtue signal and don’t actually care”

Yeah, that’s the exact mentality I’m talking about. Right wingers have used that exact line on me, because they assume all “woke” actions are performative and aren’t based in real beliefs.

I’m not willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when they use the same speaking style as those who want to hurt me and mine. If he meant to say something else, he should have said it without virtue signalling to the right.

Edit: reading Paul’s original article doesn’t really change my original interpretation. @patatahooligan@lemmy.world summarized my feelings better than I could at the moment:

In context, it is clear that Paul Graham regards any public protest for social justice to be performative and born from a need to feel morally superior to others. “Racism […] is a genuine problem”, but you are only ever allowed to “quietly” help marginalized groups. His examples for the birth of “wokeness” are people starting to report sexual harassment and racist language. Paul is very mad that people told him it’s not ok to call black people “negros” and it shows plainly in his writing.

He does not give one example of what would be a real racist thing that you are allowed to get mad and vocal about. He does not give one example of proper not-“woke” activism. This is the telltale sign of a fascist pretending to be a moderate worried about the “intolerant left”. Social justices exist, but I won’t name a single one. Helping minorities is good, but every time I see it happen it’s bad and I’m going to call it out.

Right wingers have used that exact line on me, because they assume all “woke” actions are performative and aren’t based in real beliefs.

Well Paul Graham is not referring to you, since the rest of his quote makes it clear that he is talking about those who don’t engage deeply.

Imo there’s no point in discussing a quote or article if you aren’t going to take it in good faith. If you take the worst interpretation of their words, of course it’s going to be bad.

But if you take Paul Graham’s words at face value, then he’s simply saying that he believes shallow engagement had a large and negative influence on online discourse. That’s all you need to take from that quote.

Reminder that Drew DeVault is a pedophile.

dmpwn.info

He also wrote a smear piece about Stallman and then pretended it wasn’t him.

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41838124

He is the problem. Ignore him.

What a string of grasping at straws. I’m sure this (Attempted) character assassination has nothing to do with Drew DeVault publicly naming and shaming fascist developers, with receipts.

Those are probably terrible people too. Drew DeVault is still a pedophile that stirs up shit to benefit himself.

Both can be true

Drew has posted a response in defense of these allegations.

Having read it as well the “report” on him you linked, I personally find the report lacks credibility. I take much more stock in Drew’s accounting of things, including his mature ownership of the bad decisions he’s made in the past.

As for the Stallman Report: it’s not a smear piece in my view. It’s a whistleblow that outlines an argument why RMS is unfit to lead the FSF with accompanying evidence. You may disagree with some of it, but it’s hardly malicious; I can sympathize with anyone who wishes to see better from the leaders of the major social movements of our day.

And as for why Drew initially denied his involvement, I found his response reasonable:

Myself and the other authors asserted our moral rights to publish anonymously, motivated by our wish to reduce our exposure to the exact sort of harassment I’ve been subjected to over the years.

His rebuttal curiously doesn’t dispute the facts of his pedophilia. It’s included in a blanket denial and then ignored.

Are you claiming those pedophilic accounts aren’t his? Why?

And he did more than “deny” his involvement in the report

Speaking as someone who has done a lot of my own research on Stallman’s bullshit, the depth of this report is astonishing.

That was his report. He can’t be trusted and will openly make bald-faced lies. He’s full of shit and best left in the dustbin of history.

I don’t know Drew, I don’t really give a shit about him at all. He may well be a terrible human being, worthy of all the scorn cast at him. I have no idea.

However, having all of this scorn thrown at him by what appears to be Kiwifarms (very well known for being a cesspool) after penning an article about what a sack of shit RMS is (the exact kind of scum Kiwi would deify) sure does cast a lot of doubt onto all the accusations made against him.

Kiwifarms is full of terrible people. The site still lists factual claims of his pedophilia.

Are they factual? Maybe. It’s possible.

But, do I trust a group of people who make it their whole life to ruin other’s to be honest and objective? Fuck no.

You’re entitled to put your head in the sand.

If anyone else is actually curious, spend a few minutes reading Drew’s response. Lots of words apologizing over a minor detail. Zero response to the facts of his pedophilia. Just read his words. Classic shitbag strategy.

He wrote that response so that people like you can defend his pedophilia in exactly the way you’re doing now.

Or he opted not to validate asinine accusations made by bad faith actors. Neither of us knows.

We do know that kiwifarms is full of scum and filth that would likely make asinine accusations for the lawls.

Something something head in the sand.

Read it, instead of wasting time defending a pedophile.

You’re literally doing the same thing MAGAts do.

Trump is opting not to validate accusations made by bad faith actors. Neither of us knows.

We do know that the liberal media is full of scum and filth that would likely make asinine accusations for the lawls

☝️You, literally right now

I don’t know that he’s a pedophile. I know that people I don’t trust in any way, shape, or form say that he is. That’s not enough for me to definitely call him anything. I’m defending not taking at face value the word of known trolls.

Honestly dude, “these people we can’t trust said something and we need to believe them without reservation because it reinforces my core belief and if you don’t agree you’re literally this enemy” is pretty fucking GOP.

Have you looked at any of the claims yet?

Note that he does not explain all the facts over his activities on the internet.

when I was involved in editing The Stallman Report

I remember when he was “not involved at all” with this report. Now he is?

Oh my God he looks at hentai! Oh, the humanity!

The list of subreddits he programmed his bot to run on includes one, “r/pomf” so pedophilic that it was banned by Reddit, along with many other pedophilic and racist subreddits

I did some research and r/pomf was apparently an ecchi sub with like 50 members.

Mildly problematic at worst…

It was banned with a bunch of other pedophilic subreddits (spez calling them all “animated CP”). Here’s someone complaining about it at the time

For fucks sales I thought I was blessed when I found Reddit Loli community, I’ve spent far to much time on the darker parts of the web to find that stuff, and far to often its thrown in with material that none of us a r/lolicons or r/pomf ever wanted, the real disgusting vile poo poo. it was safe here. Had it been a quarantine I would have understood, We get it out fetish is creepy as gently caress! But we were not hurting anyone. I mean those were probably two of my favorite communities because we understood one another, no one got harassed or attacked like on 4chan or 8chan, were weren’t being flooded with referral links to actual CP by robot spammers, it didn’t feel like some dark alley where I had to do shady deals for a fix, for once were safe and I didn’t feel ashamed, I didn’t hate myself, And you took it away because you don’t like it! That’s your only reason, you clumped us together with a bunch of racist, hate mongering assholes because you found our fetish morally objectionable. And don’t act like your doing some great deed by getting rid of it, it still exists, you’ve just forced us back to the places where were going to abused and harassed to find it, you’re helping no one, your just hurting us, me and my fellow lolis. You’ve left us to fend for ourselves against a horde of trolls. I’ll never leave reddit, I’ve invested to much, but as a company I’ve lost all faith in you, your saving face, not your community. [EDIT] fixed auto correct mistake and added a sentence for clarification

Stop defending Drew DeVault’s pedophilia.

HN does read like its full of jerks. Altman, Thiel, Curtis, YC connection tells a lot.