Ask YC: You are promoting me too mentality and not intellectual debate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297212

by whalliburton • 18 years ago

18 26 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

The current voting scheme promotes herd mentality and not a diversity of thought. I do not have a solution, just this observation.

ericwaller3• 18 years ago

I voted this up because I think it's the beginning of an interesting discussion, but (in general) I disagree. I'd like to know what types of discussions you think suffer the most.

Tech-wise, I think the site is more diverse then ever, there seems to have been a decline in general lisp-evangelism since I joined about a year ago.

Though I might agree that there is a certain "start-up philosophy" to which any reference is guaranteed upvotes, but competing ideas are usually just as well received.

whalliburton2• 18 years ago

This observation was in regards to the http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297080

Regardless of whether I am right, I am basically the only countering argument and reduced to a grayed out presence.

I do not care emotionally a bit whether I am read, this is an intellectual observation regarding YC's downvoting of anti-mainstream thought while promoting much of the same.

ojbyrne• 18 years ago

You cared enough about it to post this (which seems a bit narcissistic, no matter what you say). I upmodded your original comment, so right at the moment it isn't a "grayed out presence" but I'm not going to upmod this.

Alex3917• 18 years ago

Why would you have an intellectual argument about an empirical question?

ericwaller3• 18 years ago

Well, I don't think that comment should have been down voted, you were starting a discussion by disagreeing from experience.

I don't like the idea of down voting comments you simply disagree with as long as the content isn't harmful (I realize that "harmful" in this context is common pro-censorship vocab, I just mean that comments like "all root passwords should be set to 'password'" should be downvoted).

tdavis• 18 years ago

The man asked if people who lifted weights wanted to test his app. Debating the merits of weightlifting had nothing to do with that post. If he had included, "you should lift weights because it's really good for you" then perhaps your argument would have been relevant. As it stands it wasn't and I see no problem with down-voting posts based on irrelevancy.

thomasmallen2• 18 years ago

Sites like these are all about a herd mentality. Maybe you're looking for a forum atmosphere?

unalone2• 18 years ago

I'd like something to breach the gap between sites like these and forums. Because... miracles rock.

jrockway2• 18 years ago

Every forum I've ever read is even worse than the social news sites. When someone disagrees with you here, they reply with an argument. It may not be a good argument, but at least the reply is related to what they disagree with. On forums, people reply with things like "I bet you wouldn't say that to my face." instead of actually arguing the point. This is completely worthless -- why have a discussion forum if you're not going to disagree?

On the Internet, you can argue unrelentingly for your point and not have it count against you socially. In a casual conversation, someone who does nothing but argue their point would be "annoying", but on the Internet, that's not annoying. It's the entire fucking point. (And before the Internet, people wrote op-eds. Rules for conversation and writing are different. So don't ask me if I would say that to your face, because your face isn't here.)

krschultz• 18 years ago

Find smaller communities, big forums are like that but if you lose the anonymity things get a lot better.

thomasmallen2• 18 years ago

UbuntuForums is one of the best-run forums I've ever used. Not as good now as it was a couple years ago, but it's a good model.

unalone2• 18 years ago

You're exchanging one thing for another. You encourage discard clique mentality for mob rule. Each model has its flaws. And while forums scale worse, I tend to enjoy the sense of community I get there, which is something sites like THESE don't offer well.

umangjaipuria• 18 years ago

Herd mentality = when everyone has the same opinions. Going by the number and nature of comments, I don't think that is true.

Diversity of thought: Barring phenomena like the Chrome launch, look at the variety of articles here. I think it's great. Remember that this isn't generic news, but Hacker News. So it's going to be more internet & technology centric that your Wall Street Journal.

vaksel• 18 years ago

maybe turn off voting on comments, but keep voting for stories. That way good stories get dug up and bad stories don't. And you don't have people voting you down because you said something they might disagree with.

i.e. today I got voted down(went down to -1) because I said I don't like ads.

staunch• 18 years ago

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading"

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mrtron• 18 years ago

Criticism without an offer of a solution is pretty useless.

I think software could be better.

I think democracy could be better.

I think humans could live better.

rms• 18 years ago

Capitalism is fundamentally flawed.

symptic• 18 years ago

That's what makes it work.

hhm2• 18 years ago

I don't think this is entirely right. If I'm doing something wrong, and someone tells that to me, that's useful. Now I know I'm doing that wrong, and that I only have to find out a different way of doing that.

blogimus• 18 years ago

I've read through your replies to comments up to the time I'm submitting this comment.

Please explain why or how you think YC promotes ME TOO mentality.

I'm not disagreeing or agreeing with you, I just want to know better where you're coming from. For my own view, I see that there tends to be a habit of mob upvoting of already upvoted comments once comments reach a certain threshold above other comments in a discussion.

lallysingh• 18 years ago

It's not the voting scheme causing the herd mentality. People tend to subscribe to one train of thought until convinced otherwise (which, deep down, is as much a popularity contest as anything else). It's the human herd you're really complaining about.

Such complaints, btw, are (-1, Redundant).

jrockway2• 18 years ago

It is all about who participates in the voting. On Reddit (and Digg, I guess), the voting is done by retarded 9-year-old fanbois, and as a result, rewards ideas and comments that appeal to that demographic. Highly rated comments there are often some of the worst material I've ever read in my life. It often makes me pray for my own death. Correspondingly, some good ideas and arguments are often downmodded to -10, even though they are fine comments.

Over here, it's not as bad. I think the demographic here is the more thoughtful and secure type. We realize that someone disagreeing doesn't invalidate your own opinion or beliefs; it's just something more to think about. Plus, some especially bad comments are killed outright, which discourages future abuse. (Most of the things that get killed here would be +1000 on Reddit, so you can see why things are different between the sites.)

And BTW, I usually don't get dowmodded here for having the "wrong" opinion here. Sometimes I am shocked, like with this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=294691

I swear, anywhere else that would have been downmodded to oblivion. (Even though it is not a troll, I really think that.) Instead, people replied disagreeing with me. Excellent.

The system ain't broken yet.

mick_m• 18 years ago

Complaints like this turn up ever so often, but I guess Paul is still bitter about losing the popularity contest back in high school (http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html) and now wants to create a popularity contest that's geared towards him winning from the get-go. Can't keep him from doing that, all we can do is ignore the mods.

hhm2• 18 years ago

In my opinion, you are doing it wrong. The voting scheme doesn't promote herd mentality, the voting scheme is used to sort the comments on the threads. Now, should you measure yourself by your level of karma? NO. The smartest guys here don't have the greatest karma necessarily, so you shouldn't care either. Say what you have to say, and don't mind the score you are given because of it. Is that being cynical? No: because you'll see that your comments with the biggest score will often be trivial or simply wrong, so if you'd started following the score you'd start posting trivial and wrong stuff. Don't do that. Just say what you have to say, learn with us, teach us, and that's it.

Ask YC: You are promoting me too mentality and not intellectual debate.

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