>specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.
This is a human problem and it happens everywhere.
> And they are heavily moderated against negative discussion/ragebait.
So? You have to do that because it takes one toxic person to poison the well. HN is aggressively moderated to get rid of articles and opinions that don't belong too. Without it, it would be just a constant stream of self-promotion and politics.
The point is that in certain other places, someone (the moderators) worked to nourish a positive culture and it worked. HN didn't and it shows. I don't think that negativity is necessary to keep the forum interesting. Especially given that HN's negativity really isn't all that insightful. A lot of negative takes are bad, and many of them are written without reading the article, or by cherrypicking a single sentence and attacking that.
I'm saying it's aggressively moderated in some respects (off-topic content, politics, etc), but it's not moderated to root out a certain breed of snarky, I'm-smarter-than-you negativity. Many other forums police that second part and are doing just fine. This includes forums dedicated to technical hobbies.
In fact, computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics are pretty uniquely toxic and we keep rationalizing it.
I remember working on a technical blog post for my company, trying to anticipate many of the possible HN rebukes and proactively address them as much as we could. And I remember having a conversation with a PR person who was genuinely taken aback by the hostility we've come to expect in our industry.
You don't get tech without negativity. And honestly HN is very tame compared to most forums when it comes to the deeply negative.
The problem with maintaining (only) positivity in tech is you turn into $large_companies marketing department. We have to step up and say security flaws exist. That companies outright lie. That some idea (when it comes to programming) are objectively bad.
Hence why the OP is here on the thread talking about what negativity means in this particular case, because it also counts criticism.
This is something we tell ourselves to rationalize bad behavior. How come that 3D printing forums or woodworking forums or car maintenance forums can exist without toxicity, but tech somehow can't? There are people pushing products everywhere. You can ban marketing content or set ground rules for it.
Further, performative cynicism really isn't that helpful. It's not insightful to hear that every company is evil and greedy, every personal project sucks, every scientific study is wrong, and every blogger is incompetent.
There's a lot of scientific evidence that negative and controversial content has multiple psychological effects of high emotional arousal, triggers the confrontation effect and toxicity breeds retention.
We're more likely to keep arguing here when disagreeing than to agree and add much.
And again, this isn't limited to internet but irl too.
It depends how you want to measure engagement and activity. Quality of discussion is something to consider. It's very difficult to have a proper discussion when all of the responses are the same expected replies to low-effort ragebait.
ChatGPT is marketed as a tool to assist with real-world scenarios like looking up information, vacation planning, and other non-fiction scenarios.
Why do you find it surprising to find someone may expect to utilize the tool in a non-fictional way or that someone could interpret it’s output as non-fiction?
It’s unreasonable to apply this bizarre standard of “it should be treated as fiction only when I want it to be”
I'd wager "scientist with a deep background in research of rocket propolsion technology in the 1950s" was a bit more difficult to come by than "early-career software developer who integrated a bunch of APIs and maybe wrote a frontend in React".
Perhaps a quantity below "a single company causes enough of a spike in global demand that it'll have demonstrable impact in nearly every single industry"
And usually trade regulators would be the entity to start being concerned.
I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position, but do recognize that global supply issues of critical components have negative market effects, especially when it'll have some impact on nearly every industry except perhaps lawn care.
> I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position
No. I’m genuinely curious, because I agree with you about how critical these components are. I ask because it doesn’t seem to me like the answers are immediately straightforward and wanted to hear serious replies to those questions.
How much is too much? It’s like porn: you know it when you see it.
Basically one company (or a cabal of companies) shouldn’t be allowed to exert enough market-moving pressure on inventories as to disrupt other industries depending on this supply.
Sam Altman masterfully negotiated a guaranteed supply of chips for OpenAI, and there is nothing wrong with that, by itself. But there are now a dozen other industries getting rekked as collateral damage, and that shouldn’t be something one man or one company can do.
- The Switch is primarily a gaming device for entertainment purposes.
- The eShop overwhelmingly focuses on providing games for said entertainment purposes.
- It can be assumed that the overwhelming majority of people do not use the Switch, or expect to use the Switch, for general lifestyle purposes.
(That said, I wish we lived in a world where the eShop wasn't the only way to get digital games on the Switch, but phones have evolved to impact a large segment of the economy in many ways)
It’s sad how arbitrary people define things. Just make all types of digital stores support alternatives. Why are you even arguing about it lol… there’s no excuse to begin with.
>Since when does any organization factor in inflation for renewals from vendors?!
Don't ask me, ask the person who posed the question of inflation in the first place. That said...
>All the purchase renewal decisions I've been part of have been:
All but one of the reasons you listed are tied to inflation in some way. Inflation affects everything in the economy, so a company that doesn't raise prices in line with it is losing money. Even SaaS businesses with low marginal costs aren't exempt, because they still need to pay salaries for developers and support staff, both of which roughly track inflation. Therefore if business see price hikes that raise with inflation, they can assume that competitors will raise prices as well, and it's not going to be worth switching unless they're already on the fence for some other reason.
Do recognize, you're voluntarily participating in a highly moderated forum. If one were principled in their opposition to moderation, one would not voluntarily choose to use said forum for nearly a decade ;)
Part of what makes Hackernews enjoyable to read is the strong and very reasonable moderation. We aren't subject to walls of Viagra/Cialis ads or back-and-forth flamewars.
I'd argue it's because of content moderation that HN is an environment that generally promotes a marketplace of ideas.
> Part of what makes Hackernews enjoyable to read is the strong and very reasonable moderation.
I agree with the enjoyable part but "reasonable" would require careful examination of the things that didn't make the cut and is highly subjective. I have no idea what "strong" means.
Most moderation seems to get done by the voting system (powered by weak and very unreasonable users?)
What is missing is a user manual to formalize this social credit system. I never knew that I have to upvote the correct posts. I thought the system was curious about my opinion. Quite preposterous in hindsight. Ill make more of an effort, who knows, in a few years we might go full North Korea retroactively.
Some AI was done tastefully. Apple Photos search comes to mind. I can search for objects across your photos, and it does a reasonable job finding what I want. It's an example of AI that's so well done, the end user doesn't even know it's there.
Now Microsoft pushing "Copilot" is the complete opposite. It's so badly integrated with any standard workflow, it's disruptive in the worst of ways.
Google's photo app had the searching for years. It seemed a lot more useful a few years ago when it was using dumber image recognition models. Now it returns fewer matches on the same search. I tend to search the same things a few times a year as a supplement to some story and it's been frustrating to see in real time, a picture that used to come up when searching "car" or "guitar" is missing and instead unrelated pictures returned.
That's fair, but my point was that AI should be implemented in a way that's out-of-the-way but is still helpful to users.
I think LLMs are incredible, I think there's a lot of really good usecases where it can help promote recommendations and actions for a user to take. I don't think every user wants to have every app they touch into a Chatbot though.
As much as I'd appreciate more open source for the sake of transparency, binaries provided on websites aren't guaranteed to match the source code provided and I'd assume most users are pulling binaries versus building themselves.
Practically every platform has multiple software stores these days and many FOSS stores make their build logs available. Some take it a step further and provide reproducible builds, which is more or less there as far as source to binary traceability and binary trustworthiness is concerned. These are good enough reasons to open up the source, ignoring the other advantages just this once.
This is true, and this is where trusted repositories come in.
I don't necessarily have to trust each individual app on fdroid or in the Debian repos. I have trust the maintainers are building them properly, and those people are not the same people developing the core app.
The ability to do so provides some protection. If someone pulls and builds and cannot reproduce the binaries, they can at least try to get the word out. Closed-source prevents even the opportunity. Even source-available is better than closed.
I'd say HN's problem is rooted in that many folks participate in malicious contrarianism.
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