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The article could have explained the other part of the moderation better - the user moderation provided by up and down votes. Bad comments are not only flagged but also tend to be pushed further down the page towards oblivion, while better comments tend to be lifted up towards the top of the page.
Anyways, King Canute: He was Danish, not Swedish :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 suc…
> I don't know what you mean by "suspicious." I mean that, maybe you should distrust your own judgement that "HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". Perhaps other places have environments that you don't like but other people feel that they are "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". > I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all…
“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…
I thought it was just the annoyance of having the lefty/media point of view pushed hard. Whenever someone that isn't a white male achieves something, there's this push to let the whole world know that a "minority" has accomplished something. It just comes off as a "In your face! Racist white people." I'm fairly certain that most sane folk could care less about the gender or colour of the person making progress for ma…
It shouldn't, though.
Mentioning gender in relation to a woman's accomplishment is not an implicitly anti-male statement, nor is mentioning race in relation to the accomplishment of a person of color an anti-white statement. Nothing in any article about Katie Bouman was disparaging of men or white people or anyone.
>I'm fairly certain that most sane folk could care less about the gender or colour of the person making progress for mankind.
Meaning no one who disagrees with your opinion on the matter is sane? Yet reacting defensively and interpreting any mention of gender or race as hostility doesn't seem particularly sane to me.
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.
That said, it's better to have moderators who care than moderators who don't.
It seems to me that comment is a joke. Playfully nitpicking word choice while putting in a bit of banter. But the article seems to be taking the comment as a serious argument/insult.
HN being it's own top topic. Such Y
A recursive application of Y-combinator to itself seems appropriate? :-)
But regarding the article: I don't think HN is getting worse. But why it might look like it is is that it has become a very very busy site - which makes it seem hectic and thus might appear "worse".
If there's one critique that I believe is paramount it's that HN has, due to its readership, an ethical obligation that goes beyond making discussions all nice and civil.
Political issues are obviously divisive and it's perfectly fine to keep stuff like the El Paso massacre of the front page. But when hot-button issues intersect with technology, the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility.
Yes, articles about, for example, discriminatory ML do often make it to the front page. But in my impression, that topic (as well as employment discrimination, culture-wars-adjacent scandals in tech academia etc) are far more likely to be quickly flagged into oblivion than similarly political takes that just happen to be in line with HN's prevailing attitude (e.g. cloudflare-shouldnt-ban-).
The article impressively articulates what toll divisiveness takes on the moderators: Even if I read the same ugly comments, I am unlikely to experience the sharpness of emotion that apparently comes with considering the community one's baby, and making it's failures one's own. When such divisiveness is then reflected in the "real world" of mass media, the pressure only increases.
But as this article shows, abdicating the responsibility by keeping the topics sterile is similarly suspect, in the sense of fiddling while Rome burns. I believe a willingness to confront the ugly sides of technology with some courage of conviction would eventually be recognised, even if it may occasionally involve a bit of a mess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn’t call it strict at all. He’s actually way more liberal about stuff than most over-bearing Reddit mods who think it’s their job to be editors of their own private newspaper rather than helping only when there’s no other option. This is why dang is so good at what he does as it draws a difficult balance.
I'm of the opinion that it is best to err on the side of strictness. Once you make a reasonable exception, you open a precedent, and some people are very good at digging up and pointing out precedent.
As one of the people who loves being that guy in another community: They're not only very good at digging up and pointing out precedents, they likely have systematic archives of everything that remotely relates to the decisions they wish to see made.
Canute was King of England, Denmark and Norway. He was not Swedish. I think that The Newyorker is trolling Hacker News by dropping this quote in.