Zed follows up on the search for Matt

http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2008-10-30.html

by astrec • 18 years ago

42 33 18 years ago

zedshaw.com

qhoxie• 18 years ago

You did the right thing Zed. Glad you at least have answers now.

qwph• 18 years ago

I agree.

ROFISH• 18 years ago

Yeah, because Zed now has a name and number of someone's ass to personally kick. I eagerly await a follow-up, YouTube video, and plausible movie deal. :D

bk• 18 years ago

I agree. Especially since there's a socially conditioned stigma against falling for a false alarm when trying to help. It seems to be seen as a display of hysteria on the helper's part. That's why most people act "too cool" to actually do something - better not risk that precious reputation.

Better a few false positives than a false negative.

kirubakaran• 18 years ago

This was three years ago: http://kirubakaran.blogspot.com/2005/12/interesting-evening.... I still feel stupid for calling 911 (that I acted like some granny). You are right on about the stigma.

Sam_Odio• 18 years ago

The most interesting part of that post is Zed's commentary on reddit. As an early reddit user I found it blunt, but it struck a chord none-the-less.

I think it's time to move the discussion from how reddit's different to how news.yc is going to prevent the same thing from happening here. It's clear (at least to me) that comment voting just promotes group-think.

It seems we have a few stop-gap solutions (i.e. moderation) but nothing yet that's practical, elegant, and effective.

unalone• 18 years ago

Hacker News keeps surprising me. Months ago I thought it was going downhill, but it seems to have stabilized a bit since then.

Reddit still has stuff that's worth reading, but damn, you have to search now. It's a pain.

astrec• 18 years ago

Not 100% convinced about comment voting promoting group-think: I try (and sometimes fail) to vote on comment quality even if I disagree with the points made. The discussion in this place is routinely exceptional in quality, and it seems to me the few occasions on which the case for group-think could be made could equally be explained by the fact that commenters sourced from such a narrow demographic are likely to do a fair bit of agreeing.

That said, I'd be aghast if we ever descended to the level of reddit.

whacked_new• 18 years ago

This is itself the problem. There isn't any defined purpose for the up/down arrow, so people just interpret it with their own vague standards and act accordingly. Everybody will be able to make a case for their up/down votes and everybody will be right, but will also reveal very little, because you simply can't tell what the vote was on.

If you gather a bunch of crazies and give them voting buttons, the result will still be crazy. If you take away voting buttons from sensible people, the discussion will still be sensible.

The problem isn't that the voting promotes group-think. It's the entire premise of voting that is skewed. Once every while you can find a comment here, downvoted to oblivion, simply for stating an unpopular opinion. Before the issue of group-think comes into mind, you'd have to wonder what the down-voters are thinking, and further, how the way they think influences the overall discussion here.

richcollins• 18 years ago

The irony is that we said the same thing as early redditors about digg.

lionhearted• 18 years ago

The fact that HN doesn't seem to have an objective or motive to be as big as possible is good. For Reddit, more viewers = more ad revenue = winning. At the very least, HN won't actively court and support silly goofy discussion.

icey• 18 years ago

It's because of the differences in personalities between early adopters and the masses.

tdavis2• 18 years ago

Part of me likes to believe that the mere fact that so many of us worry about this issue, wish to discuss how to prevent it, and so forth may end up being enough to keep it from happening.

I see so few comments here that deserve significant down voting, but the ones I come across that do have already been trashed to oblivion. Hell, I've had quite a few of mine own comments absolutely crucified and I feel no need to argue most of them. Comments aren't what I'm worried about, it's submissions.

Anyway, on the topic at hand: I agree that Zed did the morally right thing in the situation. Was it what I would have done? Probably not, but only because I don't much care for solving mysteries given almost no evidence or reason to believe something is actually wrong. As for reddit and "social news" sites in general, I stopped actually reading the comments long ago. I liken it to reading comments on Youtube; there is absolutely no redeeming value in it. HN, on the contrary, tends to have more value in the comments than the actual article some of the time. It's very surprising and may be the only thing keeping my rampant cynicism about "intelligence on the Internet" in check, as far as discussions are concerned.

jbert• 18 years ago

"It's clear (at least to me) that comment voting just promotes group-think."

Hmm...what's the benefit of comment voting? What's the signal carried by a high vote on a comment? I guess the intention is "this is worth reading/this is interesting"?

I wonder how the crowd would react to having agree/disagree/interesting/uninteresting buttons? Would that pull some of the 'noise' out into the agree/disagree axis, leaving better signal in the interesting/uninteresting?

If nothing else, it would give the software some traction on finding people who vote disagree+interesting which might help weighting/filtering.

Harkins• 18 years ago

I think the problem is humor.

It's fun, it gets you lots of upvotes because maybe it makes someone smile. But it's too damn easy. It short-circuits real discussion with pop culture references and snarkiness. Conversation is quickly suffocated when solid posts are blanketed with 4chan memes as responses.

jlc• 18 years ago

Hm. That's an interesting observation, but I respectfully disagree.

It comes down again to the quality of the comment. Is it a good humorous comment (e.g., not cliched, satiric, perhaps humorous and insightful, and so on), or is it a bad humorous comment (e.g., stale, not actually funny)? Right back where we started.

As Homer Simpson says, "When will people learn? Democracy just doesn't work."

blackthought286• 18 years ago

I agree. That's why I stopped going to slashdot. Every time I wanted to read a person's opinion about a tech subject, i would have to wade through comment after comment trying to be funny. It's annoying after a while.

yters• 18 years ago

More generally, it's the attitude that once people start getting serious about something or it gets complex, then they're "wrong." As another commentator said, it's about seeming cool, at all costs.

That, in turn, is due to people caring more about rhetoric than reason. Regardless of whether something makes sense, if people can say it in a way that conveys the right image, they are "right."

And this is all because we spend way too much time passively consuming media, and are consequently taught to process things via image vs content.

mileszs• 18 years ago

What if the number of points for a comment were not the first item in the first line above the comment itself? I am of the opinion that moving the 'x points' text elsewhere, or perhaps hiding it until one has voted or replied to the comment, would be useful. Even simply moving it to the _end_ of the line could help to force people to think about the comment before they think about how everyone else loves the comment.

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

Or how about hiding the points and just using them to do internal calculations?

jerf• 18 years ago

I have seen that question ("How do we keep our community from collapsing into mediocrity?") asked tens of times, and the answer has been the same every time: " ".

There doesn't appear to be a way, or at least no large community seems to have ever found it on the scale of multiple years.

(I don't mean to advocate that one give up when I say that. What I'd really like to see is some real thought put into it. My real point is all the obvious solutions have been tried, and tried, and tried, and..... if anything's going to work it's not going to be the obvious.)

cousin_it2• 18 years ago

Manipulation by pity is the single human quality I hate the most. It might be possible to build a complete personality on avoiding to manipulate others, ever; I'm trying to.

gruseom2• 18 years ago

I think the will to eschew manipulation of others is an admirable one.

You've reminded me of something I've been thinking about lately and feel like writing down.

If you try to eliminate something from your personality in a straightforward way, what tends to happen is that it goes underground. You haven't gotten rid of X; you've fragmented your consciousness so that you're no longer aware of X, which makes you think X is gone when really it's continuing to operate. And X can work a lot more mischief now that it's autonomous from the part of you that wants to regulate it.

A straightforward example is the religious fanatic who suppresses his "demonic" impulses. We all know what such people tend to really be like.

Perhaps a more meaningful example for this forum is the kind of person who wants to overcome his fear by motivating himself to think he's not afraid and by executing certain actions to prove it. The trouble with doing this naively is that you can end up not with an absence of fear, but with unconscious fear, which continues to prevent you from doing things, only in ways you can't explain.

Of course, literature is replete with examples of this dynamic. The bottom line is that you can't minimize X in yourself by trying to eliminate it. It seems that a better strategy is to stay aware of X as it is happening. That way X and the part of you that is against X remain in the same field and there is a possibility of integration.

So, counterintuitively, if you really want to minimize something in yourself you have to accept it.

cousin_it2• 18 years ago

> If you try to eliminate something from your personality in a straightforward way, what tends to happen is that it goes underground.

This sounds neat, but is it true? Executing actions really does drive away fear, moreover it seems to be the only effective way to overcome fear. If you tried it, you know. :-) Quitting smoking or stopping manipulative behavior cold turkey really does work, while the gradual approach doesn't work and is self-deceptive. I have decisively and successfully driven away certain qualities, and other people agree when asked that I no longer have them.

josefresco• 18 years ago

Maddox called, he wants his writing style back.

raganwald• 18 years ago

Did you read the commentary about they types of comments his post attracted on reddit? Or some of the commentary about this phenomenon here?

Do you think your comment is more typical of HN or of reddit?

Hexstream• 18 years ago

FTA: "No, they don’t even try to mask their collective stupidity."

This kind of behavior, being conscious of and proud of one's own mediocrity, is something that has baffled me time and time again. Can someone please explain the thought process that leads to this? "People usually expect a certain level of decency and self-respect and I'm a unique, cool rebel so I'll do the opposite"?

Zed follows up on the search for Matt

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