top | item 25102730

(no title)

calinet6 | 5 years ago

The problem is not on HN. Making changes here will have precisely zero impact on society.

discuss

order

mistermann|5 years ago

I'm curious: how does one know such things?

Is there no possibility that you may be somewhat mistaken?

Note:

- your first statement references the entirety of HN; it is plausibly likely that you have not consumed (and comprehensively perceived with complete accuracy, and remembered) the entirety of forum discussions on HN

- your second statement involves events in the future - as far as I know, the ability to accurately predict the future in a multivariate scenario has never been proven

If I am incorrect on either of these two items, I would appreciate any corrections you may have.

calinet6|5 years ago

"precisely zero" was an exaggeration to be sure, but it's rather close to reality.

Look up a Fermi problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

That's a good place to start with these kinds of questions.

I figure this is true simply because of the remarkably low population of Hacker News compared to society at large; there's simply not enough people here for changes to this specific site to make an impact on the larger social media ecosystem.

To be more realistic, I'll estimate that getting the social media platform Hacker News exactly perfect from a systemic standpoint might have an impact on around 0.001% of the societal social media problem. We've then got 99.999% more to impact.

And if you believe that people reading Hacker News are somehow more influential to society than the average social media user or something... well, we would not then have that belief in common.