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The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

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Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#11

Post by onion2k »

prepend wrote: post #3

“In April, when a story about Katie Bouman, an M.I.T. researcher who helped develop a technology that captured the first photo of a black hole, rose to the front page, users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions.” This is an odd statement as it implies the purpose was to undermine. Reading code and critiquing isn’t meant to “undermine” but to identify truth and co…

The reason people were trawling through her Github contributions and comparing them to other members of the team she worked with, and then posting about lines of code as if that's a measure of the value of someone's contribution to a project, was absolutely to undermine her work and show that she wasn't deserving of credit (despite the fact she was repeatedly quoted saying it wasn't all her and that it was a team effort).

When that story was on the front page it was one of the few times I've thought about leaving HN. It was embarrassing.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#13

Post by nailer »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #7
prepend wrote: post #3

“In April, when a story about Katie Bouman, an M.I.T. researcher who helped develop a technology that captured the first photo of a black hole, rose to the front page, users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions.” This is an odd statement as it implies the purpose was to undermine. Reading code and critiquing isn’t meant to “undermine” but to identify truth and co…

...and here we go again. What was, or at least felt, obvious was that there was a double standard being applied. Not just in the sense that such a witch hunt would be unlikely to happen to a man being lauded. But also that if there's one point that Hacker News could probably agree on it's that lines-of-code is a bad metric for evaluating programmers, let alone scientists. There was also the pervasive sense of being o…

If a man received personal acclaim for a discovery, and someone looked at the repo and found that someone other than the man wrote most of the crunchier code, then yes I'd evaluate the acclaim for the man the same way.

Note most of the acclaim aimed at the scientist, rather than the team, was from the media. Whom as usual, likes to omit their own role.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#16

Post by Mizza »

Shout out to dang! You're doing a great job! Thank you!

Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. I wish good moderation was a skill that more people learned - would you ever be interested in writing a guide or teaching a class on moderation?

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#19

Post by cotelletta »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #7
prepend wrote: post #3

“In April, when a story about Katie Bouman, an M.I.T. researcher who helped develop a technology that captured the first photo of a black hole, rose to the front page, users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions.” This is an odd statement as it implies the purpose was to undermine. Reading code and critiquing isn’t meant to “undermine” but to identify truth and co…

...and here we go again. What was, or at least felt, obvious was that there was a double standard being applied. Not just in the sense that such a witch hunt would be unlikely to happen to a man being lauded. But also that if there's one point that Hacker News could probably agree on it's that lines-of-code is a bad metric for evaluating programmers, let alone scientists. There was also the pervasive sense of being o…

The only double standard is that when people are skeptical of a woman, a bunch of thirsty men jump to her defense, and turn it into a bigger issue. Not to mention the media's incessant need to profile women doing things and having a giant backpatting session for her and themselves. They are so sure women can do anything men do, they act like it's unprecedented everytime it happens.

Here's a crazy idea. Maybe any of the numerous other people who worked on that project were pissed too that she was given all the attention, and they had every right to be.

If someone pored over a guy's github, nobody would care, and certainly no random woman would jump to his defense. Somehow this is proof that men oppress women.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#20

Post by ChrisCinelli »

pas wrote: post #5
sohkamyung wrote: post #4

Curious to know why this post has a "unvote" option. I don't recall seeing that before. Is there a link that explains what it does?

Maybe you clicked upvote before coming to the comments?

I see both upvote and down vote on any thread. I used to see only upvotes that flipped to undo. Something changed.
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