I read the thread when it had something like 50 comments, and most of them were treating it as either confirmed or at least potentially true, and using it as an opportunity to rail against corporate abuse in full generality, just like every HN thread about a negative story about a tech company. It was only later that the skeptical comments started to rise to the top.
> I read the thread when it had something like 50 comments, and most of them were treating it as either confirmed or at least potentially true (...)
I think you're trying to fabricate an alternative version of reality while being aware that the facts (i.e., the actual posts in the thread) are not on your side.
You are correct that my math was a little off; by the time it hit 50 comments the skeptics were starting to prevail. That said, at 30 comments I think the comments section as a whole was still credulous. Here's my attempt at recreating what it was like then: https://ameliaquining.neocities.org/tesla-hn-comments
Note that I put all the comments in reverse chronological order because historical vote data isn't available, so which comments are at the top here isn't necessarily reflective of which ones were at the top at the time.
You can judge for yourself whether my summary was misleading.
Agree that while the skeptics eventually won out, the thread was very credulous for a while. I recall that at the time I made my skeptical comment, there was almost no skepticism in the thread at all.
> You are correct that my math was a little off; by the time it hit 50 comments the skeptics were starting to prevail.
I think you didn't even bothered to read your own citation.
The first comment literally leads with "This isn't real".
The bulk of replies are questioning the questionable claims, and asking for their sources.
There are indeed a few comments from gullible people, but to frame this as gullible people being prevalent in the thread is outright wrong, as your own source shows.
"First comment" here merely means the most recent comment, not the one that was at the top at the time, because, again, that data isn't available.
By my count, five comments expressed some kind of overt skepticism, and another four included a "if this is true" disclaimer without indicating any particular grounds to disbelieve it. The other 21 all either explicitly accepted the story as true, or implicitly didn't care whether it was true or not (e.g., piling onto criticism of Tesla without mentioning the specific controversy).
The best part is that if the alleged reality is true it's an even bigger condemnation of the community.
"no, they didn't believe it, they were engaging in strategic trolling and vote gaming" as if that doesn't imply a way more malicious frame of mind than some hapless idiot looking at the message and going "yup, seems legit, upvote we go".
(disclaimer: I wasn't in those comments, IDK who's reality is true here)
>(disclaimer: I wasn't in those comments, IDK who's reality is true here)
As someone who did see that thread evolve, let me help you out.
HN (being largely comprised of redditors) were more than happy to amplify pure misinformation because it was politically expedient. The evidence that it was fake was given fairly early on; a lot of people ignored it.
It's certainly a condemnation of the userbase on this forum.
Since HN is manually unflagging political posts, and not enforcing the 'uses HN for political advocacy' guideline the site is generally more combatative and there's a lot more hoaxes and conspiracy theories on the front page.
The problem with having a site-wide rule against complaining that the site is becoming Reddit is that when it actually becomes true you're prohibited from telling the truth.
There is no site-wide prohibition - which is obvious since these comments would be prohibited.
There are guidelines and each guideline is mostly loosely encouraged by the community here by downvoting - in effect becoming community standards. However a well written exception can receive upvotes (even though strictly against guidelines) because it is a community and individual judgement mostly gets priority.
Flagging is different because it is a much stronger signal of violation of norms, however it is still mostly a signal from the HN user community.
The moderation balance on HN appears to be quite functional to me (although I'm happy with many guidelines that others fight against).
Just because you don't consciously believe something to be true, doesn't mean you don't care about its veracity. The null hypothesis is that people are willing to treat things as true based on their priors — which could be informed by things as simple as "this was posted on a website not known as a den of misinformation, and shared on HN" — while not actually devoting thought to an investigation of the truth.
Yeah I have peeked into both and have never seen such a strident collection of vituperation, misinformation, and hatred. For people who claim to have left Twitter due to supposed toxicity, they definitely seem unacquainted with mirrors.
