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The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

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Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#31

Post by pjc50 »

nailer wrote: post #13
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

But far more commentors do this kind of hyper-scrutiny for women than for men.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#33

Post by TelmoMenezes »

Mizza wrote: post #16

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?

> Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet.

Don't you find it a bit suspicious that the forum you happen to like is "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet"?

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#35

Post by pmyteh »

kentrado wrote: post #29

My experience with dang have been limited to him accusing me of making a personal swipe and me trying convince him that's not the case. I think sometimes overly sensitive moderation is not good.

For what it's worth, my only interaction with dang was being gently chided for a slightly glib dismissal at the top of a comment I made. The phrasing I used is very common (and treated as harmless) where I was brought up in Yorkshire. But he was right; without the benefit of that context it came over as rude. I've been a bit more careful since.

Thanks, dang. A triumph of moderation.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#36

Post by pjc50 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #28
kuu wrote: post #12

Interesting that only 2 people can moderate million users

Millions of readers, the amount of active commenters is much lower. In addition, HN doesn't get much of the "classic" troll crowd (no matter if 4chan/8chan/outright real Nazis/gamergate) or Trump supporters - from the occasional politics thread aside, there's nothing much of interest for them here, and so the biggest blocks of trolls simply stay away.

Partly due to a virtuous circle; the community downvotes the more obvious ones into invisibility, and persistent trolls get banned, and the discussions are curated to select less fertile topics, and the controversy-ometer pushes flamewars off the front page.

The moderators here are very good at doing work upfront to save themselves work later, by making the site infertile ground for troublemakers.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#37

Post by nailer »

moccachino wrote: post #27
nailer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But would you ever go and look at his repo? If it is the case that she didn't contribute the most complicated stuff, then I can assure you it is not the first time in history that the face of a project is not the one that did the hardest work. Also as has repeatedly been said, she always said it was a team effort. This is all said with the caveat that I didn't follow this 'controversy' and never cared to look at the…

> But would you ever go and look at his repo?

No. But if someone else checked the repo, I'd be interested. That said the media would be less likely to publish 'this young man took a photo of a black hole'.

> Also as has repeatedly been said, she always said it was a team effort.

Yep. Also mentioned in my comment you're replying to.

I think of this conflict as 'developers versus the media' - the media having pushed the narrative of 'a young woman who took a photo of a black hole'.

The media (who like to remove their own influence from discussions) have turned it into 'sexist developers vs young female scientist'. They've been very successful at doing that, yet again, because, well, they're the media. It's easy to shape a story when you control all outlets deemed noteworthy enough to cite.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#38

Post by Mizza »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #33
Mizza wrote: post #16

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?

> Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. Don't you find it a bit suspicious that the forum you happen to like is "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet"?

I don't know what you mean by "suspicious." I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts. The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#39

Post by pjc50 »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #33
Mizza wrote: post #16

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?

> Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. Don't you find it a bit suspicious that the forum you happen to like is "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet"?

Who likes a forum they find unreasonable? That's hardly "suspicious", it's a statement about taste.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#40

Post by amrrs »

Mizza wrote: post #16

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?

Is it just Strict moderation or Members with a common goal of making this place a good / fair place?
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