Earlier quoted context omitted.
One could say the exact same thing except for the other position. Certainly there exist a number of journalists who think the media’s reporting on the topic was biased in order to garner more clicks and/or push an agenda, so it is wrong to claim Bouman just fell victim to sexists. Total non-argument.
One could say anything, but while it's unsurprising that women's achievements are highlighted because they are objectively a minority in a field that, like other fields, was shown to suffer from sexism in numerous studies, the response was different from when a man's achievement is highlighted, and that, too has been shown in studies. So I do think empirical observation is on my side as well.
The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
131–140 of 812 posts
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#132I've been enjoying the "Against the Rules" podcast [1] hosted by Michael Lewis [2]. It's related to moderation so I'll post it here. The show is series of stories/reports on the work of refereeing fairness in different parts of life. With views into how those referees are changing, and in some cases, outright disappearing. Fascinating stuff from an author who really knows how to tell an engaging story about a potenti…
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#133I 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.
How do you know that downvoting is "reflexive" - certainly any time I've been downvoted it was, on reflection, fairly well justified.
The highest downvote to upvote ratios and highest downvote to comment tree depth increase (i.e. discussion happening) occur in the time periods of 12-1 and 3-4 US East coast time by a factor of about 2. Those are actually the only hours of the day when my account personally (the only one I was tracking) has an upvote/downvote ratio less than 1 (ratio was 1.5-2 for the rest of the day). Based on the fact that I would say that there certainly exists a group of users who "reflexively" downvote. An alternate explanation is that people who hate what I have to say are most likely to use HN during those hours. Both those options seems highly plausible to me.
This analysis is about a year old and based on about 6mo of data. I have since lost the script and the records so don't expect any further analysis.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not this story, it’s a global feature on both comments and stories which serves as a “undo” for fat fingering the upvote button. Before this feature you’d often see comments along the likes of “sorry, I accidentally downvoted you while trying to upvote.”
One great improvement of UI for HN, don't ask me how often I fat fingered before.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#135It's a good article overall, but it would be nice, just for once, to read something in a mainstream "arts and culture" outlet that wasn't absolutely dripping with fear and contempt for anything related to tech culture.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it just Strict moderation or Members with a common goal of making this place a good / fair place?
Definitely the members IMO; a moderator can snipe out the occasional troll, but if all members are being pricks there's nothing that can be done about that. What you need is to maintain an atmosphere, a culture, etc. You need the community to call one another out and keep one another accountable. And you need to nip any broken windows in the bud - Reddit's comment threads often spiral out of control and into a spammy…
One of the other forums I frequent would be chock full of pricks by HN standards. They are known for being jerks on other forums that cover the same interest. It's still a very good community as long as you don't take everything personally.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#138Earlier 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.)
>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 th…
It's easy to second-guess or criticize such actions from the outside, but sometimes you just have to be pragmatic.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without the moderation the trolls take over, and then it doesn't matter what most people here understand.
I highly doubt "2 moderators" would be able to do anything if half of the community was composed of trolls. The fact that trolls are very few in the first place, and not welcome by other members who flag them and downvote them to hell, make it possible for it to work even with a low level of moderation.
Enough HN members are happy to feed the trolls (even if unwittingly) and encourage more without removing them.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#140>The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, It's a good article overall, but it would be nice, just for once, to read something in a mainstream "arts and culture" outlet that wasn't absolutely dripping with fear and contempt for anything related to tech culture.