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The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

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Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#71

Post by pron »

nailer wrote: post #37
moccachino wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> because, well, they're the media.

And because, well, it was true ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Every person I showed this to was disgusted, as was I. So even if you disagree with the characterization, it certainly wasn't just the media, but also your fellow developers. It was a shameful moment (one of many, most of a similar kind) for HN that reflected horribly on developers, and the media called it up on that, as they should.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#72

Post by mieseratte »

I think the HN culture is slowly dying. Reflexive downvoting has become very common as of late, the eternal September is brining in more people steeped in political hivemindedness. That isn’t to say all is lost, but this site feels markedly different from the beginning of the decade.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#73

Post by mschuster91 »

kuu wrote: post #52
mschuster91 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Still... I wonder how many messages are reported per day. BTW, I don't get why you're being downvoted...

Probably because I mentioned Trump supporters and -chan trolls as the biggest block of trolls on the 'net and have "Antifa" in my profile. Ah well.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#74

Post by TelmoMenezes »

Reddit2 wrote: post #63
TelmoMenezes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Reddit is actually pretty great. It's easy enough to evade the more-less-desireable parts of it. I can assure you some of the best textually-based content the last X years have happened there.

I agree. Unfortunately, I have the impression it is already going in the downwards trajectory. The new redesign contains all the red flags. When "old.reddit.com" stops working, I suspect it's over for me.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#75

Post by fphhotchips »

amrrs wrote: post #2

> On any given day, its top links might include a Medium post about technical hiring Isn't it quite ironic to see the article suggesting that HN top link might include Medium post. I've usually read not-so-positive feedback about Medium posts. Isn't it the case?

I think the argument goes that Medium, the platform, is bad for the internet as a whole and probably getting worse for its users, too.

Articles on Medium range from quite insightful to clickbait junk, as is the way of most open-ish access platforms.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#76

Post by terminalhealth »

onion2k wrote: post #11
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 eff…

It was an overreaction which, however, was only enabled by absolutely lazy journalism. They basically took Bouman's Facebook post with a photo of her smiling next to the black hole claiming that she produced the picture, blowing her contributions way out of proportion. Some reports corrected this later that day, but by then, the shitstorm and investigation had already started. Perhaps understandably--she did not produce the picture. One could argue that Bouman's reaction was also way too delayed and she did not enough to clarify the situation, but this is perhaps understandable assuming she did not follow social media very closely.

The entire fiasco was mainly caused by the obsession of the media to put women at the forefront.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#77

Post by SolaceQuantum »

mieseratte wrote: post #72

I think the HN culture is slowly dying. Reflexive downvoting has become very common as of late, the eternal September is brining in more people steeped in political hivemindedness. That isn’t to say all is lost, but this site feels markedly different from the beginning of the decade.

I would argue that HN culture is evolving within the culture it exists in. I don't recall the beginning of the decade having so many intersections of tech and everyday life. In the beginning of the decade, Google wasn't known to have paid off high level employees for sexual harassment, Facebook wasn't known to have hordes of contractors watching horrible stuff for their job, no one knew the good and bad effects of the 'gig economy' yet, etc.

That is to say, I don't recall the beginning of the decade tech and politics to be so intertwined due to how tech has become more and more a part of people's lives.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#78

Post by fphhotchips »

kuu wrote: post #52
mschuster91 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Still... I wonder how many messages are reported per day. BTW, I don't get why you're being downvoted...

I do. The direct call-out of a specific group of people for their position on the political spectrum is pretty much directly against what (I think) we're trying to do here. It's unnecessary, too. Could have just left it at "classic troll crowd".

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#79

Post by read_if_gay_ »

pron wrote: post #71
nailer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> because, well, they're the media. And because, well, it was true ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Every person I showed this to was disgusted, as was I. So even if you disagree with the characterization, it certainly wasn't just the media, but also your fellow developers. It was a shameful moment (one of many, most of a similar kind) for HN that reflected horribly on developers, and the media called it up on that, as they should.

> because, well, it was true [...] Every person I showed this to was disgusted, as was I

What you’re saying here is: because the opinion of me and my friends is objectively correct and yours is not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#80

Post by LandR »

Thorrez wrote: post #66

>Then my eyes moved down the thread, where a third user had left a new comment. It read: “King Canute was supposed to stop the tide, you couch alluder.” 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.

I think this is quite a common thing on the internet, people feigning ignorance to be upset about something.
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