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Kattywumpustoday at 7:46 PM2 repliesview on HN

I don't know. Upvotes often do the same thing, especially in siloed communities. I feel like this is a larger problem -- people leaning into extremifying their views or just playing to an audience -- even though one might frame it as "prosocial" because it happens within the context of an online community.


Replies

matheusmoreiratoday at 8:24 PM

> Upvotes often do the same thing, especially in siloed communities.

Yeah. I've gotten caught in this pattern here on HN. Post something, there's some disagreement but then I see the quiet upvotes trickling in, sometimes by the dozen. That sort of signal slowly convinced me I was right about plenty of stuff.

I used AI to datamine all of my HN comments and find those patterns. Then I started asking the AI to steelman the hell out of my world view, every single argument.

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smcgtoday at 8:03 PM

Both could be true. People follow incentives.