If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

I.E. you could say, “my website is full of people, who I think are assholes, but I don’t know what to do!” and this could be a problem.

In addition, I find that “people who don’t care when they are told that their actions might be harming others” is a pretty easy way to define an internet asshole.

Every site you type something into and press 'submit' has a complete choice as to what happens with your submission.

My take is that our current 'problems' are down to everybody wanting to record your interaction and take no responsibility for it.

That is very interesting. You do not seem naïve, so I infer you you are well aware of the social dynamics at play in an unmoderated forum.

On such a site, if I say that attacking Mr. Dash for being an asshole itself is an ad hominem, somebody is going to say, "STFU, Nigger!"

A bunch of other people, whether because they're racists, or just enjoy the spectacle, will upvote that comment and downvote me to obscurity.

Somebody else will say, "Incorrect. He's not a nigger, he's a mulatto."

A third person will play along as the straight man. "What's the difference?"

The reply will come by swift rickshaw: "About twelve dollars in confederate scrip," and will get upvotes galore.

A follow-up will say, "Nigger, mulatto, whatever, they're all going to the ovens if they won't relocate out of the white settlements."

Communities that stop moderating quickly become toxic, because even the smallest amount of toxicity drives un-toxic people away, and attracts toxic people, and without anything to stop it, the trend accelerates, until the site is dumpster fire.

And it's not just the comments. People would get away with positing all sorts of political and social stuff, "because unmoderated." Many of the people who come here for the tech would leave, because this would no longer be tech-heavy.

The "truthiness" of the front page would slide rapidly as the site becomes an echo chamber, until it would be unrecognizable as Hacker News in anything except name.

I presume you know that, so I also presume that what you mean is, you prefer a site where we would never have this conversation, because I would no longer be here.

In fact, nobody would have this conversation, because everybody here would be united in their contempt of Mr. Dash, anyone like him, and anyone who doesn't immediately denounce anything he says on the basis of him saying it.

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I am tempted to indulge in a little fallacious reasoning myself and say that what you want is not a "True Hacker News," because it would quickly become a completely different site with different people, talking about different things, in a completely different tone of voice.

But perhaps I am wrong, and what you want is all the same people, talking about the same things, but without anybody getting banned or any posts being killed.

If so... I don't think that is a stable state. Moderation is a local maxima, dumpster fire is another local maxima, and everything in between eventually gets pulled to one of the two stable states.

In other words, it didn't actually empower women. It just tolerated women venting about how very, very angry they were at men and, to some degree, taking it out on male members in AskMe who dared to ask questions about their love life. One particularly ugly incident involved a man asking for support resources for himself to cope with his wife having been raped. He was basically told he was an asshole for asking.

I wrote a long reply with actual suggestions which was deleted by the mods as "tangential" and "not answering the question." I posted it to my blog, where he soon found it and private messaged me and thanked me profusely and told me how traumatic it had been to basically be told he was an asshole for seeking support, a comment that got favorited at least 70 times.

There are no perfect communities and a good community experience is partly up to you to craft for yourself. Some Reddits seem to be decent places with a sense of community. I've been on email lists that worked for me for a time.

Hacker News had a genuine sense of community when I first joined. It seems to have less of that these days, partly a product of scale. It's grown a lot and it's hard to keep a sense of community at scale.

Even in IRL communities, large cities rely more on formality to help make up for the inability to know everyone.

The human mind seems able to have a sense of community with a group of up to 150 people. I had access to information from an internal study of one community that suggested that only 20 percent of members were 'active' participants, either regularly or occasionally. Another ten percent participated once or rarely and the rest lurked. This seems to fit with what I have observed elsewhere.

So that means that about 750 accounts gets you about 150 active participants. Anything beyond that and you see challenges in fostering a sense of community.

I've long speculated that HN's leader board ought to be 150 names instead of 100 to help foster some sense of community here, but it's a completely untested hypothesis and not anything I feel strongly enough about to actively campaign for.