I’ve always thought HN is so relatively pleasant because of the investment it puts into quality moderation. But reading this profile really underscored how different things would be had two other people, of different temperaments and perspectives on life, been selected as mods. I imagined the mods to stereotypically be, at oldest, late-20s techies in SV. But it makes sense in retrospect one is in his mid-30s, and one is old enough to have 2 children of his own.
The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
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Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#92[dead]
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
The guidelines of the site I think are the ultimate precedent. If Dang dont get ya the rest of the community likely will. HN is somewhat self-moderating after all. I have seen users point out to abuses of the community guidelines.
I feel like sometimes users with negative Karma like crazy become even more obvious to mods. Sidenote: I still yearn to see what HN looks like to mods and what not. Not to cheat the system but to understand the system more (I love knowing these sorts of hidden details).
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#94> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. I recently started contributing on another online community, a Slack, and I've found the rhetorical habits I've unwittingly cultivated creating a weird sort of mood. Nothing I'm saying is wrong , but HN has managed to make me somewhat oblivious to tone. It's exactly…
I may be misinterpreting what you're saying, but just in case: the critique isn't about "style", as in being too direct or offensive or anything like that. It's about the value system, and about how arguments are evaluated.
Case in point: a few days ago an article about India/Kashmir shortly made the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612461)
The ensuing discussion is entirely obsessed with the legalistic details of India's action: what sort of law is it/who has the authority to recind it/etc.
Read any news report on the topic and those questions are secondary to the intentions and actual effects of the policy, i. e. "is this intended to allow resettling a majority-muslim province with Hindus and thereby dilute it's culture as part of a nationalistic campaign?"
That sort of superficial legalism is rather prevalent. Any discussion of a public protest will include some people complaining about protesters not staying on the sidewalks. Discussions on law frequently find really clever "cheats" relying on too-literal a reading of the text ("Freedom of 'Speech', not of 'Writing', the New York Times doesn't have a case").
If I were to over-psychoanalyse, this approach seems to gell with a certain type of uber-rationality that denies the value of anything that cannot be measured. Hence, I've seen repeated suggestions that web fonts shouldn't exist because nobody needs more than one readable font or, more generally, that "design" is superfluous wastefulness at best and often akin to lying.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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)_/¯
Whoever is "right", it wasn't just the media, but also lots of developers, who felt it was a shameful display of misogyny. So it is certainly wrong to claim that the media spun this story a certain way out of the blue.
Also, if I didn't think my opinion was correct it wouldn't be my opinion.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#96Earlier 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.
As a counterpoint, comapre that with eg. reaction to QuickJS, when it was announced. People did not know who's to be credited for most of the work (only that two people claim copyright in the code), but if you look at the comments, it's all praise for the better known name, Fabrice Bellard, and almost no mention of the other person.
People will praise who they want to, and will bother to verify, only if it disagrees with their prejudices in the first place.
There's also a difference if those prejudices are based on something like past achievements of the praised person, or on something unrelated, like being a woman.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#97Since account creation was disabled, I'm sure it's the easiest moderation job going.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You got more than (I think) 500 karma is what changed. Downvote is disabled for users before that threshold.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#99[deleted]
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#100Earlier 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.
There should be some fuzziness about decisions otherwise you encourage gaming to see what can just get past censors. It sounds unreasonable but it works well in practice.