On HN everybody sees the same ordering. Therefore you get to read opinions that are not specifically selected to make you feel just the perfect amount of outrage/self-righteousness.

Some of that you may experience as 'dubious political stuff' and 'patently incorrect takes'.

Edit, just to be clear: I'm not saying HN should be unmoderated.

I want to agree with this. Maybe OP is young or didn't frequent other communities before "social networks", but on IRC, even on Usenet you'd see these behaviors eventually.

Since they are relatively open, at some point comes in someone that doesn't give care about anything or it's extremely vocal about something and... there goes the nice forum.

I would be intrigued by using an LLM to detect content like this and hold it for moderation. The elevator pitch would be training an LLM to be the moderator because that's what people want to hear, but it's most likely going to end up a moderator's assistant.

When video games first started taking advantage of behavioral reward schedules (eg: skinner box stuff such as loot crates & random drops) I noticed it, and would discuss it among friends. We had a colloquial name for the joke and we called them "crack points." (ie, like the drug) For instance, the random drops that happen in a game like Diablo 2 are rewarding in very much the same way that a slot machine is rewarding. There's a variable ratio of reward, and the bit that's addicting is that you don't know whenever next "hit" will be so you just keep pulling the lever (in the case of a slot machine) or doing boss runs. (in the case of Diablo 2)

We were three friends: a psychology major, a recovering addict, and then a third friend with no background for how these sorts of behavioral addictions might work. Our third friend really didn't "get it" on a fundamental level. If any game had anything like a scoreboard, or a reward for input, he'd say "it's crack points!" We'd roll our eyes a bit, but it was clear that he didn't understand that certain reward schedules had a very large effect on behavior, and not everything with some sort of identifiable reward was actually capable of producing behavioral addiction.

I think of this a lot on HN. People on HN will identify some surface similarity, and then blithely comment "see, this is nothing new, you're either misguided or engaged in some moral panic." I'm not sure what the answer is, but if you cannot see how an algorithmic, permanently-scrolling feed differs from people being rude in the old forums, then I'm not sure what would paint the picture for you. They're very different, and just because they might share some core similarity does not actually mean they operate the same way or have the same effects.

I suspect it got worse with the advent of algorithm-driven social networks. When rage inducing content is prevalent, and when engaging with it is the norm, I don't see why this behaviour wouldn't eventually leak to algorithms-free platforms.

The thing is, the people on those "algorithm-free" forums still get manipulated by the algorithm in the rest of their life. So it seeps into everything.

It is of course human nature. The problem is what happens when algorithms can reenforce, exaggerate, and amplify the effects of this nature to promote engagement and ad-clicks. It’s cancer that will at the very least erode the agency of the average individual and in the worst create a hive mind that we have no control over. We are living in the preview of it all I think.