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The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

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Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#111

Post by abacadaba »

ekianjo wrote: post #87
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 Not at all. It's rather the community that makes it a reasonable discussion space. Most people here understand that this is not Reddit and that proper answers are needed when you interact with other members. Of course moderation is useful and necessary in certain cases, but it's certainly far from being the key fact…

Without the moderation the trolls take over, and then it doesn't matter what most people here understand.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#112

Post by vonmoltke »

danso wrote: post #85
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #42

Congratulations to "paulmd" for getting a flagged comment cited in The New Yorker! ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13094354 is the comment, which I find entirely reasonable but obviously people disagreed, or at least it was considered off-topic)

Really surprising to see that comment, which, full disclosure, I agree with, get flag-killed. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it get a few downvotes. But rarely have I ever seen a thorough, well-sourced, and civil comment actually be flag-killed. If anything, the shallow replies to his comment are the type of things that typically seem to get downvoted (though not necessarily flagged either).

I think this is a side effect of self-moderation. By making everyone in the community (over a certain threshold of participation) a mini-mod you turn rules enforcement into a popularity contest. Valid, interesting, yet unpopular points get suppressed. Rules violations that are popular get ignored, and sometimes even lauded.

There is no reason, based on the HN guidelines, that the referenced post should have been downvoted, let alone flagged. Whoever did so abused their power to make such decisions.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#113

Post by DanBC »

jlawson wrote: post #81
onion2k wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

She was deserving of credit. She did great work, and so did dozens (hundreds?) of others on that project. She wasn't deserving of the level of credit that the media gave her when they cast her as the star, visionary, and quasi-leader of the whole enterprise. Nobody was ever against Katie. They were against the way the media handled the story - by slanting the story to advance a political agenda that had nothing to do…

Her colleagues disagree.

I tend to believe her colleagues over random misogynistic Internet fuckbags.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#114

Post by whiteopinions »

azangru wrote: post #108
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #68

This article does seem to get at the essence of HN, appreciative of dang and sctb's humanity while not ignoring the problems. Personally, I would actually consider it an excellent demonstration of the fallibility of one of HN's favourite tropes, Gell-Mann amnesia. 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…

> HN's prevailing attitude (e.g. cloudflare-shouldnt-ban- ). Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats. (Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.)

Why do you think this? Almost every top comment was critical of cloudflare's response for a variety of reasons.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#115

Post by whiteopinions »

>Strict moderation

I don't consider the moderation on this site to be strict at all?

It's tone police more than it is content police. HN continually lets comments and statements go completely unquestioned, and in some cases actively supports view points, that are objectively wrong in the most vanilla fashion all because it was said in the correct manner.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#116

Post by yorwba »

distant_hat wrote: post #101
beefhash wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mods should keep an archive of decisions that go the other way. This would keep a balance.

To do that, the mods need to keep an archive of all decisions, because the bias they'll be accused of is unknown until the accusation is posted. That archive probably looks something like https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20please&sort=byDate&t...

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#117

Post by ghaff »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #57
Mizza wrote: post #38

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…

I'm sure there are plenty of reasonable discussion forums, mailing lists, etc. And the more gated and the more obscure they are, the more reasonable (and insular) they are.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#118

Post by SolaceQuantum »

azangru wrote: post #108
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #68

This article does seem to get at the essence of HN, appreciative of dang and sctb's humanity while not ignoring the problems. Personally, I would actually consider it an excellent demonstration of the fallibility of one of HN's favourite tropes, Gell-Mann amnesia. 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…

> HN's prevailing attitude (e.g. cloudflare-shouldnt-ban- ). Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats. (Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.)

Could you clarify why you thought this? What evidence do you have that supports this? The big thread shows that the top comment agrees that 8chan should be left alone. [0] and the comment chain shows that there seems to be something like a significant minority against 8chan, but it doesn’t appear to be a prevailing majority.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#119

Post by octonion »

whiteopinions wrote: post #114
azangru wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN's prevailing attitude (e.g. cloudflare-shouldnt-ban- ). Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats. (Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.)

Why do you think this? Almost every top comment was critical of cloudflare's response for a variety of reasons.

"whiteopinions", really?

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#120

Post by krapp »

azangru wrote: post #108
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #68

This article does seem to get at the essence of HN, appreciative of dang and sctb's humanity while not ignoring the problems. Personally, I would actually consider it an excellent demonstration of the fallibility of one of HN's favourite tropes, Gell-Mann amnesia. 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…

> HN's prevailing attitude (e.g. cloudflare-shouldnt-ban- ). Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats. (Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.)

>Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats.

Those threads wouldn't have passed the thousand comment mark if HN had anything close to a prevailing attitude on the matter. As with many contentious issues, people tend to believe HN is unilaterally biased against them, sometimes to the point of that bias being enforced by the moderators.

>Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.

8Chan and its contingent of neo-nazis were free to communicate as they wished until the site started to become a cultural nexus for racially motivated mass shootings in the US. I don't think deplatforming them was unwarranted. They have the right to their views, but not the right to force any establishment to host those views, even when people start dying over them.

Also, there are still plenty of places on the internet for such people to congregate and communicate. They can start a private Discord server and post manifestos from the race war there if they want.

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