Ask HN: Who are the most controversial (yet still popular) HNers?

32 points by 19eightyfour 8 years ago | 46 comments

Popular == karmic, on here. So controversial is, you have a high ratio of spectacularly downvoted comments, but you're still popular, in other words, you still have a high amount of karma. Someone more experienced in statistics than I am at the moment can come up with a good metric for calculating "most controversial (yet still popular)".

I find this interesting because I know that karma causes me, anyway, to be cautious in the opinions I voice, since the downvotes are painful to me. I am interested to see people who are brave enough to not give a s%%t about getting downvoted but are still popular overall.

I'm interested in diversity of opinions, not echo chambers, and people who can combine having their own unique point of view that doesn't follow the crowd, as well as still pleasing the crowd a lot of the time are very interesting to me right now.

inopinatus 8 years ago |

I disagree with many things that tptacek has to say, but I rarely downvote him. Indeed his remarks seem to be a source of much debate and I find that commendable. In my view, downvoting should not be used to indicate disagreement, but to maintain the relatively high signal to noise ratio this forum enjoys. I reserve downvotes for ambit claims that are patently false, personal abuse, offensive language, wilfully begging the question, excessively sloppy or lazy reasoning, pretending to expertise, or simply being a pig-headed asshole about something. Having myself been guilty of these things from time to time, particular this latter, I feel comfortable suggesting that the majority of this community's members appear to apply a similar standard.

alex_duf 8 years ago | |

I quite like your guidelines on what to upvote or downvote.

I'll try it as well.

In fact, I wish there was a voting etiquette described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Nothing too formal, but just a "here's how the community like to use voting tool"

inopinatus 8 years ago | | |

My upvoting is much looser. I will upvote as a mark of agreement, or if I liked someone's framing of their point, for a nice story, for alliteration and wordplay, or if they mention someone or something I'm fond of, or indeed almost any other positive response from my limbic system.

Guidelines are a potential bikeshed. I don't think it's a terrible idea, but be careful what you wish for.

DanBC 8 years ago | |

What do you use flagging for? What's the difference between your use of flags and downvotes?

inopinatus 8 years ago | | |

I flag very rarely, for egregiously offensive language, insults, gaslighting, bigotry.

shubhamjain 8 years ago |

> I'm interested in diversity of opinions, not echo chambers, and people who can combine having their own unique point of view that doesn't follow the crowd, as well as still pleasing the crowd a lot of the time are very interesting to me right now.

I disagree. It's an overused defence: voicing idiotic opinions is "having a unique point of view"; being rude and domineering is "having an outspoken and blunt demeanour". Your opinions should stand on facts, not your I-don't-give-a-shit attitude. The difference should come from your interpretation of them. Respecting so-called controversial figures leads only to a downward spiral where we encourage bad behaviour.

Hacker news, in my experience, respects different opinions if they carry any weight. A thread on Uber has both who attack and defend Travis Kalanick. Controversial opinions, unfortunately, often means saying groundless shit and later, defending them with "I-am-a-contrarian" attitude.

CodeWriter23 8 years ago | |

Only problem with relying on "truth", at least when it comes to Science, studies often can't be reliably reproduced, former editors of prestigious medical journals say half of what they publish is pure rubbish, the NEJM gave up trying to hire independent reviewers of their papers in 1991 because they couldn't find any scientists who weren't tainted by pharma funding. I'm all for rigorous science, it's just that we have too many practitioners these days motivated by money rather than the pursuit of unbiased truth, and in their process, pervert science into nothing more than public relations.

You need look no further than the largest study of bee populations published this week in Nature to see what I'm talking about. It concludes Roundup is killing the bees, and Bayer comes out and calls the study "inconclusive" because it defies the tobacco science they previously bought and paid for.

And I just know someone is going to post a link from Snopes, confirming Bayer's version of the truth, without investigating any of the underlying science, but will accept Snopes' version of the truth as the actual truth. Because Snopes. Let's not even acknowledge nobody at Snopes has any journalistic nor investigative credentials.

babyrainbow 8 years ago | | |

Very interested to see some sources for these things you mention in first para. Do you have them handy?

19eightyfour 8 years ago | |

It's a nice community-supporting sentiment but I think the idea that such a powerful tool as a down vote is only used for noble purposes, rather than to condemn and silence dissent or as an "easy out" substitute instead of a comment for something one disagrees with, is a fiction. Am I saying all downvotes are tools of censorship and punishment of diversity? No. But I feel down votes are powerful tools, and to me the idea that they are only used for good, while noble and community supporting, is naive.

So from the point of view that considers down votes something of a problem, what solution do I see? Nothing really conclusive. I think a step in the right direction is if downvotes only affected the comment they pertained to, and not overall reputation -- then I'd feel a lot more free.

DanBC 8 years ago | | |

> as an "easy out" substitute instead of a comment for something one disagrees with,

That's a good thing. I don't want to read the same tiresome spats everyday. I would far rather some people just downvoted comments and moved on.

nailer 8 years ago | |

> Your opinions should stand on facts, not your I-don't-give-a-shit attitude.

I agree yet look at this completely differently: your opinions should stand on facts, not how you feel about those facts or the tone of the person stating them.

honestoHeminway 8 years ago | |

Darwinism, a very objective result - was considered a insult by many for years and even brought to court. Yes, you can defend that civil- but what if your oppossition considers even civil disagreeing as a insult?

Your opinion implies rationality on the side of society and a lot of other unspoken pre-condition to discurs, which never make it to reality.

sarabande 8 years ago |

One way to calculate this would be to use this controversy formula (https://math.stackexchange.com/a/318510/10887) on all comments of a user whose total karma exceeds a certain threshold, say 1000, and then add up those controversy scores.

The problems is that the HackerNews API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API) only provides a total score for a comment, instead of up and down votes, so you'd have to modify your controversy formula to use an appropriate measure of dispersion instead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion).

I'm not a statistician myself, so I can't help further.

sametmax 8 years ago |

What do you want to do with this information ?

Getting downvoted in HN is not very hard. You can mention how Bill Gates is trying to buy a stairway to heaven or that Rust should replace C and you'll get spanked. If you express personnal opinions enough times on a website full of intellectuals you are bound to displease regularly unless you have nothing interesting to say.

It's a good thing. You can't be right all the time. You can't agree all the time. Actually, quite often you won't.

But to be downvoted spectacularly, it's quite easy: promote religion, or borderline sexist/racism allusions and you're it. Doesn't matter if you are right or not.

On the other end you can be pretty much who you want to be. I mean I worked in porn and had only one snarky remark about it during the last years.

19eightyfour 8 years ago | |

I mainly want to see what people are like who are effective but also don't care about being downvoted.

brudgers 8 years ago |

Several years ago, I started treating downvotes as feedback on what I wrote. Maybe I was not clear in stating my view. Maybe I did not sufficiently back my view up with examples, facts or rationales. Maybe what I wrote was just plain wrong. Maybe what I wrote didn't add anything to the conversation.

The practice of editing [and deleting] of my comments seems to have made my writing better. Writing for myself is easier than writing for an audience. And writing for an audience that expects me to give a shit is harder than writing for the audience that admires people for pretending to not give a shit. And no doubt, this thread illustrates -- as if the rest of the internet did not already provide overwhelming evidence -- that there is a large audience for writing that pretends not to give a shit.

Flame warriors and trolls are the original internet crowd. Not giving a shit is not a unique point of view. It's the default content of all the little internet boxes into which people can type. It's good that downvotes hurt because the solution is writing something better.

Good luck.

guardian5x 8 years ago |

Maybe TerryADavis, he gets a lot of praise and admiration on HN for creating TempleOS, but his comments are often downvoted, and with good reason.

Luff 8 years ago | |

An interesting and fun introduction to Terry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcqWok8AubE

sofaofthedamned 8 years ago | |

Bloody hell, he's definitely fallen out of the tree, hard. I just looked at his site http://www.templeos.org - he sure does like to use the N-word.

honestoHeminway 8 years ago | | |

Beeing shizoid, the ultimate minority, feels less outside of society, if you have someone to look down upon. If it was a normal person, i would call it racism- this way, i would call it desperat socializing, with a willingness to consier even racists as company.

mnm2 8 years ago | |

omg: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis

He says things and expresses himself in a way, which is in strong violation with social norms and hacker news guidelines. How could that be?

bamurphymac1 8 years ago | | |

Wow his posts read like a markov bot using racist screeds and religious texts as corpii.

Poe's law and all but sure reminds me of being manic and my word salad speeches. Hope the guy is OK.

jwilk 8 years ago | |

What's exciting about TempleOS?

yellowapple 8 years ago | | |

It's a one-man-developed operating system written in a one-man-developed programming language, both of which are self-hosting.

The fact that something like that can be achieved by a schizophrenic man who uses the "n-word" in sentences like one uses butter on toast is truly inspirational. TempleOS is an excellent example of so-called "outsider art", but is also a significant technical feat on its own.

hungerstrike 8 years ago |

Comment voting is a form of mob rule that only serves to make the average person more comfortable while obstructing change.

In my opinion they need to be replaced with something more decentralized that puts each individual user in control of what kind of comments they want to see and makes them each decide individually.

Imagine if people who everybody disagreed with always got censored? We'd have all sorts of situations where everybody would suffer until things like basic hygiene for physicians were discovered. Oh wait, that already happened and you can read about it here - http://www.medicaldaily.com/mad-scientist-6-scientists-who-w...

Online systems are so much more fluid than real-life and we have a good opportunity to change the way things are done, but unfortunately the biggest sites for conversation all follow the same brain-dead upvote/downvote system. I hope that one day we'll have a better system which at least lets individuals choose their own moderator or moderation style.

moomin 8 years ago |

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mjg59 is a good one: a talented developer with strong views of free software, personal freedom and social justice. I can easily see individuals furiously upvoting and downvoting him on a single day.

(Not everything he says triggers these reactions, but it's entertaining when it does.)

joeblau 8 years ago |

I would throw a vote in for Joshua Stein, person who started https://lobste.rs.

  > I was a frequent reader and contributor to Hacker News since 2007, 
  > but got hellbanned[1] in 2012 for complaining about the mystery-
  > moderators constantly changing submission titles for the worse.

[1] - https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...

matt4077 8 years ago | |

Oh, I didn't know that practice has been going on for that long. It's sort of become my pet-peeve as well, seeing as how the "war on clickbait" has resulted in moderators frequently changing perfectly good titles into bland three-word summaries that often do a worse job of representing the articles.

I think they're operating from a definition of "clickbait" that includes anything that makes a headline appealing, including any sort of pun or metaphor. There's nothing wrong with changing "Ten reasons MySQL is better than PG–and how switching may safe your Data". But it should be done sparingly, and default to respecting that the headline is also creative work, and deserves a bit of respect.

The worst example was http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5139. Halfway through, the post reveals that the author had a heart attack. Not mentioning it in the title was quite obviously a literary choice.

HN changed the headline, before changing it back, to something like "Jason Scott had a heart attack"

(but I guess I better shut up now :). I'd also like to mentioned that, with dead_posts=on, I've come across some seriously above-and-beyond work by dang. Just recently he was basically giving therapy to some guy posting wild rants in low-contrast posts at the bottom of some thread. )

jwilk 8 years ago | | |

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13765240

unityByFreedom 8 years ago | |

Wow interesting. I didn't realize there was an alternative hacker news that people actually use outside of reddit. Guess I'm in my own bubble

I like his moderator transparency, downvoting explanation scheme, and overall approach to the site. Seems to be quite run quite differently than HN/Reddit

SFJulie 8 years ago |

Since I got the pattern of downvoting, I am bored.

I thought first they were smart and it was funny to understand what wwould made you upvoted/downvoted.

Then I understood it was plain propaganda/censorship whether you were taking an opinion refuting the godliness and virtues of VC/startup/entrepreneur.

HN is the modern pravda except it is liberal instead of being sovietic.

Same shit

davidivadavid 8 years ago |

Funny — I scrolled to the bottom and saw two comments citing two names that popped in my mind after reading the title: 'yummyfajitas, and 'michaelochurch.

There are other people who are "topically controversial", e.g. people who have a background in HFT getting downvoted on every HFT thread, and so on.

yason 8 years ago |

since the downvotes are painful to me.

Why?

itengelhardt 8 years ago | |

I guess it's just the general loss aversion people experience - at least that's it for me.

_0ffh 8 years ago | | |

Also I think getting downvoted for something when you honestly can't see that you did anything wrong is kinda hurtful, which happens mostly when downvoting is used as shorthand for disagreement. I've seen a single comment of mine go up-down-up-down with every refresh which still ended up at +4 or so. Which makes me curious if separate up- and down-counters might offer some additional insight over a single counter.

boyce 8 years ago |

I guess idlewords? Always worth reading his comments

gaius 8 years ago |

michaeochurch

jwilk 8 years ago | |

I guess that's a typo for michaelochurch.

statictype 8 years ago |

yummyfajitas

> I was a frequent reader and contributor to Hacker News since 2007, > but got hellbanned[1] in 2012 for complaining about the mystery- > moderators constantly changing submission titles for the worse.