Item — HN Reader

> I don't think there's a strong consensus on Hacker News. Even something like the time of day an article is posted might get different engagement depending on who is active in which time zones.

Based on my own experience and reading, I do think there's a general consensus on this site but I could certainly be wrong about that. I'm less concerned about hypocrisy per se, it's more that the arguments that are used, even if by a minority, seem to apply in only circumstances in which China releases open-weight models.

I am aligned with your viewpoint as well. And I've repeatedly argued it. If China were to take the lead the US can then just release open-weight models. Folks say having the lead doesn't matter because China releases cheaper open-weight models. We can just let them take the lead and then do it back to them.

1 comments

> It's common, if not inevitable, for people who feel strongly about $topic to conclude that the system (or the community, or the mods, etc.) are biased against their side. One is far more likely to notice whatever data points that one dislikes because they go against one's view and overweight those relative to others. This is probably the single most reliable phenomenon on this site. Keep in mind that the people with the opposite view to yours are just as convinced that there's bias, but they're sure that it's against their side and in favor of yours. -dang [1]

The problem isn’t that people on HN have a bias, I feel it’s pretty balanced. The problem is that when there are any sides, they spend the top 100 comments rehashing the same arguments, often over a political bugbear or web design faux pas.

That pattern became a lot more obvious when there are five new front page AI posts a day.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42205856

> The problem is that when there are any sides, they spend the top 100 comments rehashing the same arguments, often over a political bugbear or web design faux pas.

It's not even about sides, if for the last few hundred days you read a few AI related threads a day, then you notice that almost all arguments are rehashed, literally it's the same thing repeated using different words for 80%+ of comments on almost every AI thread. I started skipping most of it because there is genuinely nothing new or interesting added to these discussions.

> The problem is that when there are any sides, they spend the top 100 comments rehashing the same arguments, often over a political bugbear or web design faux pas.

This is a problem with any upvote/downvote based site, in my experience. It only takes a couple people who are highly engaged and who have a lot of free time to refresh the comment section and downvote everyone who disagrees with them.

Some times I’ll write a polite and well-sourced comment correcting some misinformation here and the comment will go to -2 or -3 when I check back in 10 minutes. Information that goes against the angry narrative du jour is often not welcome. Later, as calmer heads read the article and peruse the comments the downvotes start to get balanced out and the comment might rise, but some times the first wave downvoters are aggressive enough to get the comment downvoted into gray text before it has a chance to be seen.

the downvoting rings ( or bots ) are very active here. I think they're mostly bots, but who knows i guess

I don't think they're bots and I don't even think they're organized.

In my experience with other communities, it only takes 3-5 people with a lot of free time to crush conversations they don't like. On a fast moving comment section a wrongthink comment can be buried into the bottom half of the comments with only a few early downvotes.

When I used to run a spam factory my impression was that success on Reddit was all about avoiding the downvote brigades that would nuke you before you got your first 5 upvotes. Write a post on proggit where you confess that you are partially in it for the money or have any interest in the business of software and hoo boy, that's why I migrated to HN.

I still think bots run the /new and what gets to the first page shrugs

I'm certainly pro-America and anti-communist/fascist as a bias, but I don't really care about whether AI tools are open-weight or not. I just use the products that best fit my needs. I just think the arguments put forth regarding China and open-weight models and strategy are not very good. It just so happens that China is the only real competitor in the AI space and so they are who get talked about the most in comparison to the United States.

This comment isn't applicable to me, and if you believed that it applied, you'd have to add it to the OP as well since they feel strongly about Meta[1], they notice data points about Meta's behavior, and they overweight their bias against Meta[1] relative to others. Same with China "leading" and open-source/open-weight models and any time someone says China's strategy is better.

You can repeat this for any online argument or any topic.

It's not that Dang is wrong, however. It's that posting it in response to my comment(s) alone is hypocritical and pointless. Whereas Dang who is more responsible for the entire community is right to speak about it more generally. The message matters but so does the messenger, in this case.

[1] I don't use any Meta products (I don't even click on links), think social media should probably be outright banned, and Meta very likely should have been sued into the ground for the effects that their platform seems to have not just on children and young adults but also on our political system.