Has there been more conspiracy comments on HN lately?

I see the more general problem is "automatic responses" to certain topics, where conspiracy theories are a part of that.

If Facebook is mentioned, there is always someone saying how terrible Facebook is, even if it's an article about how Facebook's datacenters run their air conditioning. They just can't help but post about hating Facebook.

Similarly, any mention of certain topics result in someone spitting out the related conspiracy theory.

Perhaps those posts are inevitable, but I wish people downvoted them due to not being relevant. It seems they trigger the right emotional response to get upvotes.

I remember the first time, years ago, that I saw a “Reddit-style” quick take be upvoted, instead of downvoted for ignoring the guidelines. I was sure it was the beginning of the end.. and maybe it was—but it still feels like now we are at the beginning. So almost certainly lower quality now, but no where near bad enough to outweigh the good. Overall the level of discourse is still much higher than any other online community I’ve ever been a part of.

I've always wondered how long it would take for HN to succumb to an eternal September where the "rest of the world" finally joins. Whatever HN is doing to keep discussions as high-quality as they are is pretty incredible. Yes, HN has changed over the years, but the fundamental aspect of conversation quality hasn't changed significantly.

Do you have some examples? To me, the lowest quality comments are always in the cryptocurrency related submissions but it's been like that for a long time. Overall, I don't feel there's been a significant change in comment quality and I rarely see conspiracy type comments being up voted.

Maybe there are more conspiracies happening - there are more humans than ever and more communication channels than ever, should we be surprised if more conspiracies occur? Or are you simply referring to opinions currently deemed unpopular or outside of the Overton window? Those are the opinions I most want to hear, I can get mainstream thinking almost anywhere, it’s mainstream.

Thus, without any examples your question is impossible to answer.

I joined 2016, but was reading already years before and honestly I feel HN went downhill from tolerant forum with civil discussion to place where anything against HN hivemind (not that different from most of US companies which vastly support Demoracts with their donations) is downvoted into oblivion.

You call those comments "conspiracy comments", I call them comments with alternative views and as we learned through the pandemic, the people banning and downvoting the "conspiracy theorists" (who were actually spreading facts/truth) were in the wrong and they still can't admit their mistake and it's same thing with anything political.

You question why would be Russia firing rocket at Polish farm - bam, conspiracy theorists, Russian troll! Next day, oh well, shit happenes, Ukraine just made mistake, let's forget about it and let's forget about those conspiracy theorists from day above, but let's keep their downvotes so they won't dare to spread their opinion.

I'd prefer if HN went back to technical topics away from political nonsense which has hardly anything to do with technology. I especially don't like the raising amount of self/metaposts like these with questions how you spend your free time, how long is your... and other teenage topics, which is quite surprising considering recent poll where vast majority of users should be above 25-30, so one would expect certain level of maturity.

Given the simplicity of fune-tuning LLMs these days, it wouldn’t surprise me. I’m actually shocked it’s not more prevalent. I’m almost positive these systems are running on 4chan /pol/ as a means of throwing discussions off topic.

Heck, some guy on YouTube did that already and documented himself posting 20,000 posts in a few days using a fine tuned model.

What I think has happened is that the culture wars are taking over more and more topics. Not only the obvious stuff like race, LGBTQ+ rights, crime, and labor, but increasingly things that don't traditionally fall on the left/right axis: vaccines, lab leak theory, content moderation, and even programming languages to some extent (admit it, the representation of trans people in the Rust community triggers some people).

One thing that gets me is that, putting aside the question about whether one side or the other is right, the culture war stuff is just incredibly stupid. It's like people have gotten a lobotomy and their ability to do critical reasoning and respond to empirical data has been replaced with just pure tribal identity. My sense is that this is happening across the country (and perhaps to some extent the world), and HN actually has it easier than a lot of other places.

Definitely. There are frequently people who state unproven things as fact. For instance, when discussing the FBI informants' role in the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot. It isn't a proven fact that "the FBI planned it" or anything of that sort. Yet, many HNers asserting it was an FBI false flag.

I've noticed that around elections there is a slight relaxing of the rules about partisan politics (or maybe the moderators just get overwhelmed).

This rapidly brings in the low quality/conspiracy/baseless claims stuff.

In my experience, it is already calming back down.

2016 was questionable. 2020 was not. There is no conspiracy, this is fact checked by Snopes.

This thread is already if drawing comments in defence of those “conspiracy” theories. So yes I’ve also noticed the same pattern.

The fact that this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33674562) survived for as long as it did despite wildly transphobic "automatic responses" (nitwit005's words, well put) tells me that we're probably on that downhill trend. I remember (vaguely) a particular automatic control existing to mitigate low-quality discussion by simply demoting threads with heavy flag/unflag trends from the front page, and here we have an example of a thread linking to a pretty inflammatory blog post that managed to stay on the front page for hours despite being littered with comments that were flagged/unflagged repeatedly. Even now it's #50, seven hours later.

Just with that single case study of a topic, yeah there's a downhill trend to be noted.

Edit: oh hey, the flagging actually worked this time. lol

I dont aggree == conspiracy. Seems to be the trend.

I was rate limited all day for making some pro free-market comments. So, at least the moderators are cracking down on something.

Basically any post that disagrees with Sinclair Broadcasting, Turner Broadcasting, Fox news or Disney is a conspiracy theory so there aren't many of those here because of their popularity here. But if that bothers you feel free to continue hiding comments that go against your limited view of the world.

Agreed. Voting and flagging seems to be taking care of them though.

HN why would this flagged? are we that fragile?

I don't think so

There is a growing amount of users that are coming up with interesting comments

"conspiracy" is usually something a reader do not understand, lack details, knowledge or simply just the context, or is confused about something, it's ok, it happens

Use that as an opportunity to challenge your method of thinking, acquire new knowledge, and develop argumentation skills to challenge something you feel is wrong

Argumentation remains the best weapon to fight misinformation

It's not interesting if everyone thinks the same

As long as we remain civil, we should encourage each other to challenge our views and ideas

Depends on what is meant by 'conspiracy'. If you refer to certain American and British political topics, you're not wrong. Some people whose opinions I formerly valued have been thus subsumed by the vast divisive misinformation machine to which we find ourselves subject in this age. It's not without historical precedent, but it is nonetheless a sign of the times.

It seems like there are more off-the-cuff or aggressive comments from people who can’t turn their opinions, right or wrong, into discourse everyone can participate in and learn from. (Like this one.)

Slowly educating or misinforming a forum or newsgroup over a couple of years by sharing dozens of interesting links and writing a book’s worth of novel analysis is a dying hobby.

Perhaps, but only around E.M.'s intentions re: Twitter, that I've noticed. One or two about the supposed "real purpose" of HN, but I gather they come up from time to time anyway.

truth is always an issue

Yes, absolutely.

its all a conspiracy

OMG we are going to hell

I don't qualify as I'm a recent observer

cast me as one who has not vaxxed