Internet comments get provoked by seeing something one objects to. When the thread is new, the only things to object to are the article and the title, so comments come from people objecting to those. Such posts tend to be reflexive and shallow because those are the fastest reactions to feel and the quickest to write. Mostly they are made from pre-existing thoughts and pent-up energy; there hasn't been time yet to absorb (let's call it) the fiber of a story—the specific information, the diffs, the curious bits. Thus they tend to be generic and angry, and usually are just triggered by some surface detail. Not good, but here we are.
Then there's a second wave of commenters who post objections to the objections. Those usually get upvoted, and that is how we so often end up with a "I can't believe these comments" or "WTF HN" comment at the top of a thread.
It's a mechanical process which has nothing specifically to do with either the content or the community. The community is simply large enough that for literally any $X there are sufficient readers who will reflexively object to $X. We're all full of reflexive reactions, just to different things.
Is that what we want here? No, but it's important to diagnose it correctly. The objections-to-the-objections wave (and yes, there are third waves too, and on it goes) can be just as reflexive and shallow as the original posts. The quality of these comments doesn't come from the content or the specific views being expressed—it's about what level of (let's say) the nervous system is producing them. If it's a fast, reflexive, cached reaction, that's not interesting. It can't be, because by definition it's about something else—something one has seen or felt or argued about before—while interest means being interested in this, what's new about it. For that one needs to access a slower, reflective mode (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Responses of interest are slower to appear and seem to come literally from slower processes in the body. It takes time to process new information and for a new response to form. New responses are interesting and produce richer waves of conversation, as people have new responses to those in turn. We could call that the curiosity dynamic and that's what we're going for here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
> When the thread is new, the only things to object to are the article and the title, so comments come from people objecting to those. Such posts tend to be reflexive and shallow because those are the fastest reactions to feel and the quickest to write.
It'd be very interesting to see how a short delay of posting comments on new post would impact this.
Compared to other vote-based sites, HN is very health - but to your point, reflexive, shallow comments are the easiest.
I was thinking about a similar scoring strategy for comments as is applied to articles. Articles which generate more comments than upvotes are deprioritized. Perhaps comments that garner more comments than upvotes could similarly be deprioritized (not unlike reddit penalizing controversial opinions [those with both upvotes & downvotes] )
I'm envisioning a use-case for this would be when say, an article briefly touching on tech interviewing (or with a title about tech-interviewing) is posted, and immediately the top-comment changes the subject to "Boy tech interwiews really grind my gears!" Suddenly everyone wants to vent and the thread is overwhelmed.
One natural reason for this penalty is that a highly-ranked comment brings along all the comments that ride along with it to the top. The most extreme form is when the entire comment page is a single comment-thread.
Alternatively, a flexible proposal is to allow users to choose their sort preference, like they can on reddit.
I wish there were an effective way to distinguish between upvotes-as-agreement (or amusement) and upvotes as distinguishing between signal and noise. That seems to be one of the biggest problems in large communities that rely on it. (besides, like, clearly offensive and moderateable behavior)
So, I don't think there is one. At least not one compatible with democratic-like systems.
The fundamental issue here, at least to me, is that the upvote is an "I like this" signal. The instinctive use of an upvote is to see more of what you like. Turns out that what people like is what people already agree with.
Unless you build a strong culture that values the signal/noise ratio (remember that early reddit had much more of "UPVOTE IS NOT A DISAGREE" culture, hivemindy as it was), you're not getting your desired outcome. Worse, if you let in the mobs, it doesn't matter how principled your initial group was as they'll soon be overwhelmed by the crowd. The historical record there is obvious.
I think the only way about this is gate-keeping. You want that culture, you'd better enforce it. If you somehow start with a seed userbase of principled people, you only allow people voting rights once they meet whatever gatekeeping criteria that you've set. I don't think this is that scalable, but smaller more tightly knit communities might be a plus to some.
Actually, I'm wondering if something like this might have a niche out there somewhere. We know that Digg in the old days had the superuser group, and the strength of reddit was it's specialized subreddits. Would a system crossing specialized subs with hierarchical user privileges (viewer/voter/voter_with_grant_privs) be something that could work?
The fundamental problem is that people will treat upvotes as agreement, even in communities who set out to make sure this isn't the case. I stopped posting at tildes.net recently, which has this exact problem with upvotes in spite of this being a cultural pain point that caused so many of tildes' users to leave reddit.
In a way it's sort of evolutionary. People attempt to propagate their own ideas or similar, and remove ideas they dislike from the meme pool, via voting systems.
A slightly modified version would be to delay on post depth (assuming less depth = more delay)
If you take it to the extreme, a youtube video being posted and everyone having to wait 5 minutes to comment, there is enough people that will see it at 4.30 to have a visceral reaction and post inflammatory comments. You can extend that down to each level of comments.
HN already does this to some degree, the "reply" button is hidden as you get deeper into a tree of comments.
You can, of course, click on the timestamp and see it anyway, so it's more of a speedbump for folks who don't know all of the details of how the forum works than a true delay, though.
Is there any datasets made available about this? Given our current inability to discuss things online without disastrous consequences, seem like it could be useful.
Presumably you are talking about HN discussions but what your are saying sounds extremely general
Is there a way to get timestamp data from these threads? I'd be interested in analysing some of these and sharing some results and examples of this at work.
All the comments are timestamped. The HN API has all that, and you can probably also look at other sources, e.g. Google BigQuery's copy of the public HN dataset.
“Reflexive and shallow” seems to be a “talking point” on HN today.
The parent post to this was talking about a pro-authoritarian slant, not the quality of post. Pro-authoritarian =/= reflexive, shallow, generic, angry. Can be. So can anti-authoritarian. Just as much. Sometimes more. Much more.
I don’t know how the pro-authoritarian observation leads to the analysis above. Frankly, I don’t see the pro-authoritarian slant from the top posts.
The whole discussion I’m reading is about the changed/expanded definition of a “journalist” for gathering stats. A valid, almost instinctive observation because practically everyone has a high-quality video camera in their pocket nowadays. And has then wondered, “well, if I capture an event, am I a journalist?” Not a deep life-changing musing, but everybody who has recorded a video event on a smartphone has thought it. So the 2020 mind is primed with those thoughts.
A result like this is posted, and the definitional issue is immediately brought to mind, because it isn’t that far away from lived current experience. The only issue I have with the discussion is nobody answered the basic question in the top responses...so was the definition of journalist responsible for the effect?
The name-calling against “pro-authoritarian” suggests that, in fact, it was. But just a guess.
The guy above was arguing the pro-authoritarian slant would emerge first simple because HN is so big, that some people must have that slant, and those are the people who will react first.
After that, will be a wave of complaints about the first responders (e.g. in this case he pro-authoritarians). This wave gets upvoted heavily to sit at the top.
So when you and I arrive 9 hours after the drama, we'll see the top X comments either complaining about a slant that is now down-voted, or up-voted comments being reflective of the true biases of HN.
That's basically what happened here.... it's not that the pro-authoritarian comments are naturally shallow, is that they were merely the first comments posted in the first seconds after the article was posted, and are just reflexive since no one reads an article in seconds. If we post an article with a pro-authoritarian title, we'll get a wave of reflexive anti-authoritarian comments too.
Shouldn't there be an equal contrarian dynamic among anti-authoritarians?
I suppose there is, and it's segregated by thread. Some topics attract first responses from libertarian anti-authority types, such as crypto and intellectual property.
But even so there's a kind of overlap. It's anti-authority when it comes to obligations, and pro-authority when it's about property. Or more generally, anti-authority about us, pro-authority about them.
That's not so much "contrarian" as simply "selfish", but it does have the "pent up energy" that dang mentioned. And yeah, I do think you see a lot more selfishness on HN than in the past.
Reddit couldn't be a better example of the fact that culture is absolutely set by moderation policies. But whatever you say, dang.
This is a throwaway because I've deleted the passwords to my past 5-digit karma accounts because of my disgust with the commentor's of this site's obsession with freeze peach and their prepondency for posting misinformation.
Has anyone gone back and looked at Corona threads from earlier this year? Remember when HN was telling everyone that there was absolutely no societal harm posed by anti-science folks pushing anti-vaxx and flat-earth theories?
Meanwhile I know that numerous others like me have lost all interest in participating and have left. Because this is what happens when comment sections aren't moderated properly.
I don't see a pro-authoritarian bent in the comments in this thread. What I see a lot of is people pointing out that the definition of "journalist" is very very loose in 2020, and that has an effect on the arrest stats. Many many many people have watched with their own eyes, live on video, what's been going on through the course of this year. We've seen CNN and ABC reporters shot with rubber bullets and accosted on live TV, but we've also seen a lot of "journalists" throwing rocks and molotov cocktails on live stream and doing other criminal acts.
There is a healthy and natural cynicism and suspicion of what appears to be a lop-sided reporting of the occurrences during the protests and riots in 2020. That suspicion may benefit people who are pro-authoritarian because they can play on it, but it doesn't necessarily mean those who are suspicious are pro-authoritarian themselves.
The article does a lot to try to explain what it /doesn't/ classify as a journalist, but never says what it does classify as a journalist. Those definitions are central to the point of the whether or not these stats are actually meaningful in any bigger sense than to say "well duh, of course more people were arrested during a year of protest and riots".
>While we recognize the importance and the rights of the private citizen who snaps a photo or video of an arrest, this site will only cover individuals who self-identify as journalists and have some track record of journalistic work.
Splitting hairs over the semantics of the word 'journalistic' is an attempt to discredit the study about authoritarianism being at an all time high in the U.S.
You have only to look at the numerous comorbid attempts to throw out broad swaths of democratically placed votes to see that it's not about "but are they a true journalist?"
If you take a picture of something happening on your street and write a blog post about it, you are not a journalist. If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist. If it's a side gig you don't intend to make a living doing, you're very likely not a journalist.
There are plenty of instances where someone can fit into the article's definition of "journalist" where they probably shouldn't.
Would you say people aren't software developers unless they are employed by a company to predominately develop software? Because your comment certainly reads like that type of gatekeeping regarding who is and is not a journalist.
The fact that arrests of journalists are being tracked implies that some gatekeeping about who is a journalist is necessary. The clearer the definition is, the more meaningful the statistics will be. That is the only way we would actually be able track whether journalists are being targeted by police.
> The fact that arrests of journalists are being tracked implies that some gatekeeping about who is a journalist is necessary.
Not really. Just track the statistics for full-time journalists. Then you don't have to engage in gatekeeping of journalism, you're just sensibly excluding full-time bounty hunters who wrote a news article that one time from the statistics on arrests of full-time journalists, even if the bounty hunter was, in that one instance, a journalist.
The dictionary definitions of the two might be similar, but there is a big difference in connotation and modern usage.
I would say the focus is on opposite sides of the spectrum. When you are defining a group, the primary focus is on who should be included. The focus of gatekeeping is on the people who should be excluded. This is usually done in order to raise the status of those who are included or those who are setting the rules for inclusion. Those rules are often arbitrary or draconian and are usually set by some central authority (or someone who feels they have such authority). This authority will then be the one who doles out permission for others to participate.
That is where the software developer example comes in. Anyone can join the open source software development community and they will only be judged on the merit of their contribution. They might have never contributed to any OSS. They might have never been paid to develop software. They might have no formal education in software development. None of that would matter if we are defining people based on the merit of their work. However they would likely be excluded in a system that relies on gatekeeping.
A definition of journalists that excludes small scale bloggers, and such would create a different population from say, one that comprised "anyone who self identifies as a journalist", for instance.
It would perhaps be tautological if the OP had qualified professional software developers, but the tautological definition for "software developer" is "anyone who develops software (irrespective of whether they do it professionally)". If we're going to pick nits, we may as well be accurate, right?
Which was exactly my point. They are limiting the title of "journalist" to exclusively people who have been anointed as journalists by some gatekeeping entity. This rules out hobbyist, freelancers, self employed people, people just breaking into the industry, and all sorts of other people. The software developing equivalents of those people are inarguably part of the software development community. Why wouldn't their counterparts in another industry be considered journalists?
If you don't rule out hobbyists, freelancers, and the self-employed, I can declare myself a journalist, start a blog or a Twitter, and start throwing Molotov cocktails, and if I get arrested for it, that's another arrest of a journalist.
And as a Molotov-cocktail-throwing opponent of the regime, I want to raise the number of arrests of journalists, because that makes the regime look bad, as shown by this thread. Even if every single arrest is of someone like me - a left-radical with a Twitter account, not Walter Cronkite or whoever - it's unlikely that anyone will bother to check, and even more unlikely that, if anyone bothers to check, very many other people will hear about it.
Where is this trope of Molotov throwing journalists coming from? I have seen it multiple times in this thread and it is just bizarre. No one would consider someone throwing a Molotov a journalist, no one would count such an arrest as the arrest of a journalist, and no one would consider the arrest an attack on press freedom.
>> If you take a picture of something happening on your street and write a blog post about it, you are not a journalist.
> Yes, you are, and should be protected.
Protected from what? Being arrested for recording a public event, surely. Being arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail, surely not.
So the crucial distinction is what are these journalists being arrested for, and also do we have a surge of people who are trying to cover their own knowing illegal behavior by wearing a PRESS badge.
With the collapse of local newspapers -- and what local newspapers remain often eschew investigative reporting due to lack of resources or unwillingness to alienate patrons -- there are many places where someone maintaining a local news blog as a side gig is the important local press. These people definitely deserve to be seen as "real journalists".
> If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist.
But if you would, you might still not be. I once got press credentials (and a steep press discount to an event) because I wrote for a group blog and knew a guy.
I admittedly haven't read the article yet (I'll carry the shame until my dying day, etc), but does it take into account that we've had a lot more unrest than usual this year? Even without an uptick in authoritarianism, I would expect more journalists to be arrested in a year with lots of riots and protests against the police than in a calm year. Specifically, you have record numbers of journalists working in close proximity to police officers who (warranted or not) are working long hours with people shouting in their faces (let's say, "conditions for which they're inadequately trained").
Maybe you'll argue that it's authoritarianism either way, and maybe you're technically right, but a top-down directive to arrest journalists sounds a lot different (and scarier) than the situation I described above.
> I admittedly haven't read the article yet (...), but does it take into account that we've had a lot more unrest than usual this year?
If you have more unrest than usual (and it shouldn't be usual at all to have unrest) it's even more important to have more journalists circulating freely and writing/publishing freely: that's how you get to see and understand what's actually going on.
If you don't have journalists doing their job freely, you only have the state propaganda to listen to.
No one is arguing that journalists are unimportant, only that an increase in journalist arrests could be a really scary thing like authoritarianism or it could be that they just had a lot more contact with crankier cops.
Oh yeah I agree with that, I was just arguing that especially because the US had more unrest it makes even more problematic that journalists got arrested.
That's a symptom of the fact that the establishment does not want the press to document what it's doing, to the point that it's arresting journalists.
> That's a symptom of the fact that the establishment does not want the press to document what it's doing, to the point that it's arresting journalists.
... or it's the other thing: more journalists in closer contact with crankier cops. Or maybe even some combination of the two. This is my point--we can't draw conclusions from an observed spike in arrests.
Is it a symptom of that, or is it a symptom of the fact that it's much easier for the sorts of people who'd go to protests and do things that get them arrested anyway to call themselves journalists?
> Splitting hairs over the semantics of the word 'journalistic' is an attempt to discredit the study about authoritarianism being at an all time high in the U.S.
Those two things are not the same, and in many ways aren't even connected within the context of this article.
1. The article's definition of journalist would allow me to claim that I'm a journalist. I would never consider myself as such, nor would any reasonable person, yet my photography has adorned the covers of published books, my writing has been published on respected news sites, and I've been invited as a speaker to conferences as an authority on a variety of subject matters.
"Some track record of journalistic work" is a very low bar, depending on the meaning of "journalistic work" and "some track record".
"self-identifying as a journalist" is an even lower bar.
2. If you'd read the article, they even assert that half the incidents reported occurred to people not associated to any known or major media organizations and presumed to be freelancers.
So, I don't think it's just "splitting hairs", the definition is central to the validity of their methodology. Is there a problem with growing authoritarianism in the US? In my opinion, yes, unequivocally. I've been discussing this matter in my circles for more than a decade. The revelations from Snowden, the work the CATO Institute/Radley Balko did on police militarization and brutality, no-knock warrants, asset forfeiture, etc. are all strong evidence of a persistent and growing authoritarian trend in the US. That may or may not validate the evidence in the article, but the way the article states it's evidence and methodology comes very much down to semantics about what it means to be a "journalist", and that is not a decided question in 2020. One can recognize and acknowledge growing authoritarianism in the US while at the same time pointing out flaws in the article and it's associated study methodology.
I think it is not in good faith to try to tar people who bring up good questions about definition as "splitting hairs", or being pro-authoritarian, or in other ways trying to straw man their position. You can be anti-authoritarian, be against police brutality and the suppression of the press, have observed with your own eyes credentialed reporters being harmed and assaulted by the police in 2020, and still want to know with some specificity what this study considers to be a "journalist" for the purpose of reporting their stats.
So in looking at the first link. I had a hard time finding a single example of anyone pretending to be a journalist, except maybe the owner of the twitter account. What I did find were hundreds of videos of random people getting in fights, the owner of the account talking about the fights he had also engaged in, and a lot of claims about people being part of a secret underground antifi something or other. In reality not one of the videos seemed to be depicting anyone supporting or proclaiming that they themselves were antifi (though I’m sure there are a few somewhere in there) but most especially there was no video of evidence of any of the “secret” antifi activity that the owner of the account seems to be selling in his upcoming book.
As for the second post. It is indeed a person wearing a shirt that says press on it who is not a journalist. However, the given reason was “so he would not be shot by feds” which to me highlights the spirt of this conversation, that there is growing concern as well as some evidence that the country has sifted toward a more authoritarian bent.
Edit: I forgot to mention that there were no rocks or molotovs being thrown in any of the videos I saw, which there were reportedly hundreds of.
"Portland Fire & Rescue treated two Portland Police members injured by rocks thrown by individuals in the crowd. Both of them went to the hospital for further treatment. One of the rocks (pictured) weighed 9.5 pounds and was thrown by a person in group of people wearing "press" as the officer prepared to ride away on a truck. "
"At about 12:36 a.m., Portland Police began moving the crowd to the west as before. This went on for about twenty minutes. Police made more arrests. During this time people in the crowd mingled with those with "press" written on their outer garments as cover and threw rocks and bottles at police. People with "press" written on their outer garments also threw objects at police. Somebody threw a rock, which broke a window in the vehicle giving public address announcements. Others pelted the same vehicle with rocks causing dents. Other vehicles were dented by thrown objects. At least one car parked along a street had windows broken out when a rock or rocks thrown at police, missed them and struck the car windows. "
> The fact that at no point did police simply open fire in mass. Well that is truly impressive.
You think that it's "impressive" (?!) that the police, while working, did _not_ commit mass murder in response to being called names?
What hideous third-world country do you live in? And while many people see the police as degenerates, your description and expectations of them are about as low as a human being could go.
For all the claims and all the links posted, the only crimes I actually saw on video were police assaulting nonviolent people who were acting as press and wearing clothing labeled press. Not really the slam dunk evidence that there are tons of "fake press".
It's true that there was one police report you linked mentioning people labeled "press" attacking officers, and Andy Ngo himself claimed that this is happening. Everything else is just recycling of those claims (e.g. Andy Ngo retweets that Fox News reports that Andy Ngo says fake press are attacking the police).
If this really is happening all the time, I would expect it would be easy to find video evidence of it happening repeatedly, as we do find for other activities that definitely are happening all the time, like police brutality against protestors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95GCraUPiGE.
Andy Ngo is known to use selective editing and openly lies about facts, and is not a valid source on anything\
A single instance of a protestor who falsely claimed to be press, and did not commit any crimes does not prove that people who claim to be journalists are throwing rocks or molotov cocktails.
Wow, downvoted hard just for bringing this information to light. This forum is going downhill and its not because of an "authoritarian" trend in this thread.
Is 117 arrests “at scale”? Cause that’s what we’re talking about. Normalize that for riot conditions and it just seems likely a journalist is more likely to get hit by lightening than be arrested. Please don’t do the math on that, elaborating for emphasis.
Even "as scale" (whatever that means) arrests can't really be meaningful in this context. If the contention is that police are unjustly targeting journalists, arrests are one tool they can unilaterally employee. It would be interesting to see rates of arrest vs. charges files vs. convictions I suppose.
Would the same logic apply for unrest in Hong Kong and Belarus? "Ah, it's just the riots causing authorities to arrest journalists, literally nothing to see (or read) here!" :P
> I don't see a pro-authoritarian bent in the comments in this thread. What I see a lot of is people pointing out that the definition of "journalist" is very very loose in 2020, and that has an effect on the arrest stats.
This itself is an authoritarian tendency that is increasingly alarming me lately (a feeling that started after 9/11.) I think we're going to see "journalist" becoming a licensed profession within the next 20 years, which is a commonality amongst all authoritarian dictatorships. When people start talking about who is or isn't a journalist, and identifying ideological opponents as not journalists, the only outcome is a media that is defined as legitimate by how loyal it is.
> When people start talking about who is or isn't a journalist, and identifying ideological opponents as not journalists, the only outcome is a media that is defined as legitimate by how loyal it is.
What is it about so many of the commenters in this thread that they're allergic to good faith objectivity? When you write a study for publication, or arguably when you report about a study, one of the things you're responsible for doing is to define any terms which may otherwise be ambiguous for their usage within the context of the study. Defining what this one study / article means by the word "journalist" is not the same thing as gatekeeping, and it certainly isn't some slippery slope of demanding that journalism be a licensed profession. I haven't seen a single comment advocating for that. What I am consistently seeing is several people asking "For the purposes of this study, what qualifies as a "journalist"." Which is a very fair question and deserving of a good faith response.
I haven’t seen anyone alleging to be a journalist throwing rocks and molotov cocktails. Can you verify this? If this is something we’ve all seen a lot of, then somehow I missed it.
This may dovetail into some of Ben Thompson's stratechery posts into what actually is journalism in this day and age of zero friction and marginal costs to publish/disseminate information...the traditional definitions themselves are changing
If it's someone who has a shred of journalistic integrity, simply observing, recording and/or interviews regardless of their political stance, then I'm absolutely against their arrest. While I'm also against cherry picking journalism, oh well, they cant be targeted either.
If you're in one hand with a camera and the other hand a rock or molotov cocktail, you're not a journalist. Too many folks are claiming to be journalists when they're not and for me, that ain't right. This leads to governments being allowed to be authoritarian with, sadly, very good reason that will convince mass populations to vote against the freedom of the press.
How these two types of individuals are being confused, that's beyond me. Again, I think we should all just go back to being hunter gatherers and fight bears for blueberries at this rate.
The livestreamers with sufficient common sense aren't going to do that and leave the most blatant evidence in the world lying around for their inevitable conviction. It's a bit harder (though not impossible) to hide that on a stream where you don't get to selectively edit.
Same. I've been seeing more "the boot is justified unless proven otherwise, and no I don't need to provide a source; and if it is proven otherwise, I've already lost interest and moved on." and less "innocent until proven guilty." Obviously there's some of both and always has been, but I feel the same as you do.
I remember when a website counting how many days James Clapper has avoided a prison sentence after he gave a false statement was big on the front page a while back.
Just the other day there was a thread about experts identifying an illegal toxin used on protestors in Portland while LE illegally blocks access to storm drains so that further evidence of it cannot be collected.
Both threads pertain to law enforcement overstepping their bounds with impunity and secrecy. The toxic gas one was flagged off the front page despite 125 upvotes in a short time.
We try to reason about the world. When the world appears to be unjust and we feel powerless to change, we (humans) tend to fabricate justifications for the actions of others. So that we feel better about themselves and we can move on thinking bad things won't happen to us.
This is how you see someone getting beaten during an arrest and people are like "but this guy was once arrested for such and such". The assumption being, since they are "bad" people, that's the reason why bad things happen to them. And, therefore, that won't happen to "me". This requires one to ignore the fact that force wasn't called for.
In this particular thread you see that: "they must have been doing other things rather than just filming" – while we have seen multiple, documented, instances of people doing precisely nothing.
We also see "No True Scotsman": "What exactly is the definition of a journalist?". Which would be fine if we were just trying to understand the methodology, but not "these weren't actually journalists, therefore, they shouldn't count and everything is normal".
It's a tough reality check for a lot of people who grow up in the US, thinking it's a free country with equal protection of the law, when they realize that there are at least two tiers of protected overclasses (wealthy landowners, and the police) to which only subsets of the law applies in practice (to say nothing of the underclasses who are routinely beaten, robbed, and killed, with no consequences for the attackers).
It's not a small adjustment in one's worldview, and it's normal and common for people who have benefitted from the false narrative to want to cling to it and reject contradictory evidence, as you pointed out.
These are pretty outrageous claims you're making, and you'll notice that the people making such claims never have evidence to back it up. Your viewpoints are grounded in thousands of other people in the same echo chamber as you repeating the same claims as a cultural weapon to gain political power, but there's never anything backing it up. I don't care how many people you've convinced to hold these beliefs, it doesn't make it true.
You say that I want to reject contradictory evidence, but you never provide the contradictory evidence. Having a bunch of people convinced that the police are evil isn't contradictory evidence. Having people repeat your viewpoint isn't proof that the viewpoint is correct.
For an extraordinary claim you need extraordinary evidence. For something like your anti-police sentiment (which is funny because now all of the sudden nearly all police are evil, in all states, all counties, no matter the gender or race breakdown of the police, no matter what city/county/state/department laws and procedures are, all of the sudden police are all just evil? That's curious isn't it?) it isn't backed up by evidence. You can link to videos alleging "police brutality" but none of them that I've ever been linked to show such a thing. Of course mistakes are made, when there's millions of interactions between citizens and police every day, a one in a million or even one in a billion mistake still happens, humans aren't perfect. But for the claims you're making there should be extraordinary evidence, and there isn't any.
Now, somebody else in the world will read your comment and in some part incorporate it into their viewpoint, and repeat it elsewhere, just propagating the idea further.
> the underclasses who are routinely beaten, robbed, and killed, with no consequences for the attackers
Most of the people I know have been beaten or robbed at least once, or narrowly escaped being beaten or robbed. In almost all cases, the perpetrators were never caught. Are we the underclass?
The vast majority of cases of assault, robbery, and murder are not carried out by wealthy landowners or the police. If you're that concerned with people being beaten, robbed, and killed, your priorities should be different.
The majority of theft is done by wealthy owners (wage theft), or by the police (civil asset forfeiture).
As for murders, most of them are from people you know, there is a vanishingly small chance that you are killed by someone that you do not know unless you yourself are a criminal.
But murders and beatings yes are an exception. Outside of times of war, where you again are likely to die or get seriously injured to protect the interests of the owner class.
Also, criminals are generally not prosecuted very often because it's not that important to the system that you get justice, really. With police, it's different, because it's not a question of not caring, but instead of actual accountability.
It's truly scary times we live in... It feels like the entire word has developed an authorization bend.
The United States has a sitting president who is attempting a self-coup with the majority of the legislatures in his party supporting it, or at least not condemning it.
You make your claims as if it was fact and yet it isn't. Millions of people in the United States think you're completely brainwashed. The same way as somebody a few years ago that was freaking out that Obama was building work camps to force all gun owners into. For somebody outside of your echo chamber your viewpoints sound ridiculous.
The sitting president and his allies are actively trying to bypass millions of votes by asking state legislatures to appoint electors against the state's voters' will. That's a fact. Well, they did until that didn't work. Then they tried to throw out the electoral votes of four swing states. Trying to bypass an election like this is indeed a coup-attempt! I've got sources and everything! I've put a few sources below but I'm sure you can find more. These attempts to throw out millions of votes is not normal.
DeSantis urged Pennsylvania and Michigan residents to call state lawmakers and urge them to intervene. “Under Article 2 of the Constitution, presidential electors are done by the legislatures and the schemes they create and the framework. And if there’s departure from that, if they’re not following the law, if they’re ignoring law, then they can provide remedies as well,” he said.
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-tr...
"After waiting over a year to challenge Act 77, and engaging in procedural gamesmanship along the way, they come to this Court with unclean hands and ask it to disenfranchise an entire state," they wrote. "They make that request without any acknowledgment of the staggering upheaval, turmoil, and acrimony it would unleash." --SCOTUS
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/944230517/supreme-court-rejec...
1) Donald Trump is trying desperately and very publicly attempting to overturn the results of a legitimate, constitutional, and legal election.
2) A coup d'état is defined as an illegal, unconstitutional seizure of power.
3) A self-coup is coup d'état by a leader who originally came to power legally.
3) Ergo Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election is an attempted self-coup
4) Few Congressional Republicans have condemned this coup attempt, and, in fact, seventeen Republican state attorneys general and more than half of Republicans in the House of Representatives signed an amicus brief supporting it.
It repeats for Americans over and over like a tape. The outrages literally copy themselves just switching sides. It's very hard to even discuss these matters with Americans since they have both picked their favorite football team and hold onto their dogmas just middle age church.
Not to get too meta, but I think rich people and SV have always tended toward authoritarian; it's not like rich people get hassled by the cops that often. Recall also that SV got its start by selling tech to the military[1]. It's not something sudden.
You have to remember that HN is by and of a very specific part of wider society.
That's not a true statement about HN. Less than 10% of the community is in SV—it's all over the world and has tons of different "very specific parts of wider society". That's one reason why people argue so much about this stuff. If you think the HN community is SV-friendly or even startup-friendly, it may surprise you that many people in those communities feel like it's exactly the other way around.
I wrote "HN is by and of a very specific part of wider society". (I can see how "by" could be interpreted to mean the community, but I meant the authors/operators.) Are there any poor people who work on or for YC or HN? Genuinely curious; I assume that YC's staff and most everyone involved in maintaining and running both this site and YC in general is relatively prosperous, at least compared to the median in the US.
I'm sure that a website of this level of traffic receives all manner of visitors and participants, but I was specifically referring to the people who created and run it, and set the rules and general expectations of tone/topic on it. (I'm not calling you authoritarian, just "of SV" and not-poor.)
[edit: Also maybe I'm wrong and that the ratio of participants vs authors/operators is so vast that the operators play no part in setting the tone beyond the rules (and of course your hard work), in which case my conclusion should be dismissed and the question about why it seems to skew authoritarian should be reopened.]
There's a fallacy in your question if you think that any of us who work on HN determine anything about what comments show up here. That's a function of the community and is way beyond our control. Literally anyone can make an account and comment.
Thank you dang for this statistics. No wonder people find these SV extreme ideas weird and even weirder when they try to blame it on 'russian bots' etc. So deep in bubble that they can even grasp the idea what world is out there outside of these SV local ideas.
Here's an example from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25389506. I could give you a hundred more. Both sides feel like the site is dominated by the other side, to a degree in proportion to the intensity of their own views. In fact this phenomenon is so reliable that one can use it to predict not only a person's politics but how strongly they feel about it.
You know, you've got a sample size here that'd make for a hell of a study. Maybe get hold of Scott Alexander, I hear he's taking some tentative post-doxing-threat steps out of the bunker.
Not even kidding. I'd participate, and I'd be fascinated to see the results.
I would guess it's actually that HN has members who aren't from the major tech metros, and people outside of those areas tend to be more conservative (in a relative sense at the very least).
For many, this would be the main place they ever come across those people, which would make it seem unusually conservative.
As a theory, Y Combinator, thus HN, is strongly aligned with startups which, in less hip circles, are "small businesses". Small business tends conservative because regulation disproportionately impacts them (eg. regulatory capture). It would certainly be nicer if more regulation created a level playing field and actually prevented anti-competitive practices.
To counter balance the above blatant and unfair stereotyping above, I'll add some devil's advocate too: "change the world" type leaders might also be more idealistic and would vote progressive anyway, even if it's not good business sense.
There are people here all over the world. In large parts of Europe liberals prefer low taxes and small state to conservatives who want to give their old voters all sort of gifts and benefits. Probably the American idea of a libertarian is more suited.
The cliche about engineers being STEMlords is not entirely untrue. There is certainly a thing where engineers like to think of themselves as smart, intelligent self-made men who justifiably earned their high salaries in contrast to, say, some dumb humanities major who's now making coffees.
Often it's a libertarian flavor, particularly here in the startup community where the cliche of the self-made-person looms large. Libertarians have some overlap with liberal positions in some areas (personal freedoms in general, drugs specifically) but disagreements in others (government regulation and spending, etc).
In practice though most libertarians today can generally be characterized as conservatives who want freedom in the areas that affect them personally. They want to smoke weed, or get gay married, so those things are good, but they're conservative in most other areas.
I'm shocked, but I get a sense there are more conservatives here than ever before. Or maybe they were always here but now find themselves less prone to self-censorship.
I've been reading HN since the late 2000s and only noticed this post-election. It always seemed as if HN was incredibly liberal. Now there are conservative-leaning voices and opinions cropping up everywhere that are being upvoted as top comments.
I'm seeing a markedly conservative shift in tone.
I'm not saying this is good or bad, but it feels new.
I think the Trump era emboldened a lot of normally quiet conservatives to be more outspoken in their views.
Particularly in the tech scene, you can get the feeling that everyone is very liberal, and so you better just be quiet and keep to yourself.
Personally, I saw so many people completely overplay their hands when it came to things Trump said or did, that it made me more comfortable having them downvote me through the floor and tell me nasty things because honestly who cares? Someone on the internet disagrees with me. Neat. I can disagree back.
Part of that is maybe just me being four years older though and really has nothing to do with the garbage fire that has been the news and media environment since 2016.
Honestly piracy is something that most people with jobs don’t have time for. Keeping up with where to get what is a chore. Netflix and Spotify do it for me thanks
It would be interesting to see if it was a recent shift, my feeling is that is not that recent, but I could easily be wrong.
A sibling comment mentions that tech is not immune to the divisiveness that is happening to at the moment, and I think that's right.
I also think that tech, or just humans in general, are not immune to being self-interested. Once you have a 100k+ salary and potential for more in the future in the USA, it's not in your interest to support social unrest or anything that upsets the status quo. I imagine this does subside a bit once you get real security in your life ( some significant property, savings, strong network, etc ) but there is a large gap between being secure enough to be comfortable in your own life and being comfortable enough that your own interests are secondary.
This _definitely_ does not apply to all people and all situations, but I think it is an effect, it's typically framed as "as you get older you get more right-wing" but I don't think it's anything related to age particularly and more to do with where you are on the ladder.
It's just that recent issues have made controversial policing issues much more salient. Speaking for myself, I've always thought that riots are very bad and the police should use extreme force to shut them down - I just never really ended up talking about it until recently, because it was never a tremendously interesting or relevant topic. In general, it's important to remember that any consensus you see on an Internet forum is implicitly selected for people who care enough to talk about the issue.
I've got a pretty clear idea, yes. I think people who go around wrecking stores, setting fires, etc. ought to be forcibly dispersed, using tear gas and riot shields and such if they won't leave.
(This will unfortunately have to be my last comment on the matter, so sorry in advance for the lack of response - I've been instructed by the mods in the past not to discuss this topic at any length.)
If you subscribe to the debt cycle theory by Ray Dalio [1], late cycles see a rise of inequality, populism and finally authoritarianism.
(I am skeptical.)
I see more interest in parsing the numbers beyond just 'arrests'. I think it is worth looking into what kind of arrests these are and the nature of them.
No shift - it's just that most people espouse their convictions with an unstated parenthetical that those convictions only apply when it furthers the power ambitions for them or their allies. Not much else explains e.g. how Julian Assange's rep has changed in the past 10 years.
I'm sure if anyone responds to this, it will be to tell me why Julian's case is actually different and now he's dangerous for democracy...but sorry, no, his case isn't different. You're just a hypocrite.
tech people aren't immune to the hyper divisiveness taking place around the world. Once "your team" decides it no longer wants to respect freedom of the press or election results then you must follow suit. Gotta make sure your team wins, right?
Well if you question your beliefs then you can arrive at your first principles, and then you can start questioning things people tell you by ensuring that you understand them as derived from your first principles. That's called thinking for yourself and one benefit of doing so is that when other people tell me I'm not thinking for myself, I know that they're wrong because I know that I have direct access to the truth. People who don't think for themselves rely on others for access to the truth.
Sure, some don't, but most do (at least unconsciously), that's just how people behave. Some people consciously try to avoid "playing on a team" with various degrees of success, but it's a bit unnatural and actually quite hard to do.
Then you're probably following a losing strategy. "Team" doesn't have to mean "generic normie political party"; there are other team dynamics at play. In any case, if you haven't partitioned the political space into allies and enemies along at least a few planes, you're probably going to get taken advantage of (at the very least).
If you're not attuned enough to figure out why political alliances are worthwhile, your opinions probably aren't that original.
It's not a matter of "reassurance" - it's about economies of scale. If the best explanation you can come up with for why a bunch of people exhibit a behavior you don't is "they have a personality flaw", this is very strong evidence that you don't actually have a good grasp of people's motivations.
> Strength in numbers is a compensation for insecurity.
"strength in numbers". ≠ "economies of scale"
The former is about relative group size, mutual defense within the group, and reducing the risks of aggression against outgroups.
The latter is about increasing the effectiveness of coordinated activity more generally (which, yes, can include defense and aggression), especially those activities that persuade people. Winning hearts and changing minds about issues, especially across faction/party lines.
Making common cause with others who mostly share your views, even if the issues you most care about aren't the same ones, is just good tactics. Making common cause with those you mostly DISAGREE with on the issues that you DO agree on is good STRATEGY.
Originality imposes no attempt at either agreement or disagreement. Suggesting that a person must either agree or disagree (forced dichotomy fallacy) to achieve any desirable outcome misses the point. It is a solution not wanted.
Why do you think people who are undoubtedly smarter and more original than you are also buy into political "teams"? If "conformity" is your best answer, then once again, this demonstrates you don't really grasp what's going on.
This is not meant as an insult to you, but just as a warning that you should keep this in mind when you’re analyzing your own decision making; you are pretty clearly neither smart nor original. It’s very unlikely you are actually ever going to have any valuable original thoughts, at least in the way you seem to think you do.
I’m sure you’ll appreciate this since your profile is all about “radical honestly”. Taking Dalio seriously is another sign of a hopeless midwit with an inflated sense of intelligence.
It is one thing to build political alliances for practical reasons (a necessity if you want to achieve anything), it is entirely another thing to take on every and all opinions of your alliance regardless of their merit. That's a personality flaw that everybody has to one degree or another.
Being anti-"journalist" isn't the same as being pro-authoritarian.
99% of institutional journalists are sockpuppets for prog neoliberal authoritarianism. I can think of a single-digit number of well-known journalists who I actually respect and generally expect to provide useful/unbiased information. This isn't a left/right authoritarian/libertarian thing - anti-corpo-journalist sentiment is pretty widely shared across the spectrum.
Being in favour of, or okay with, journalists being arrested for doing journalism is _intensely_ authoritarian, whether you agree with them or not. Especially if you disagree with them, really.
I believe your phrase "for doing journalism" is what the debate is truly about here. We would have to have information about the full context of each of the journalist's and police's actions to make a justifiable judgement. As others have mentioned, the majority of arrests may have occurred as a result of strong misunderstandings of "freedom of the press"
I think it's wrong to arrest journalists for doing journalism, but I don't really care about legally punishing "journalists" doing "journalism", where "journalism" is targeted violent harassment, slander, vandalism, etc.
They call themselves "libertarians" while being, in fact, quite authoritarian. Libertarians support criminal justice reform, including reducing the power of police.
Libertarianism changed a great deal in America in the past 20 years. It’s not what it used to be and has been usurped by the right wing and corporate types.
I think there's a lot of reasons. Part of it is that, as the power of the tech industry has grown, journalists have become more active in exposing how it abuses that power to make the country, and the world, a worse and more degrading place to live in, and people on HN don't like being reminded of how they contribute to that.
There's also a ton of people who are just reflexively hostile to the idea that society is systematically unjust and exceptionally hostile to the idea that they benefit from the ways in which it is unjust, and as mainstream journalism has been largely sympathetic to these ideas, they are in turn reflexively hostile to mainstream journalism.
Part of me thinks it's 'intellectual elites' here that simply can't fathom not working at a FAANG job making 250k+ and don't understand the problems most people have. And if you aren't working at one of those you must be the ultra silicon valley entrepreneur trying to do the next big thing because money.
Probably downvoted for this but whatever, I think it's the truth. When I first was on this site a few years ago I thought it was a cool forum for geeks, but it's just not that at all really.
HN has never been a forum for geeks. Y Combinator is an investment company focused on profit, like any other. It and (much of) the HN readership extract that profit from technology, but the money ultimately supersedes the tech. This is worth remembering when reading HN threads on regulation or open source software.
HN has always been pretty far to the right. There is a strong Trump contingent. A huge "law and order" (but not when disrupting when laws are "ridiculous and dumb") contingent.
On HNs it is normal to denigrate the "MSM" while cheering on some blogger and his completely unsubstantiated claims. Attacks on the press, because there's a strong Trump contingent here that have an issue with reality and fact having an "anti-Trump bias", are cheered on.
There is a lot of right-wing content rabbit holes to fall into. Most people aren't inherently looking to understand what others are going through. It can make you think that others are lazy or ungrateful, and that events, even if they span the whole country - in every state and major city, that these events are just overblown.
It is known as brigading. They see a post critical of police and the right wing people come in and do a bunch of posts to obscure the fact that BLM and the police accountability movement is extremely popular.
It is 100% planned and engineered. They know their talking points. They know what to point to in response to police accountability discussions. Change the subject to talk about random looters instead of the 99% of protestors who peacefully assemble and then are brutalized night over night.
It's been like this for a few years now. I see part of the problem being people who are suddenly rich through high salaries or exits that also suddenly become Republican and don't care about anything but taxes. i.e. civil rights, freedom of the press, etc...
