141–150 of 812 posts
"Gackle replied. “We can’t stop that any more than King Canute”—the ancient Swedish king who demonstrated the limits of his power by trying, in an ironic spirit, to command the sea—“could stop the waves."" 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.
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?
Also, I think that it's pretty special that the vast majority of the comments on this article is people disagreeing about what HN's prevalent opinion is. It's easy to have all kinds of opinions when you don't moderate (eg 8chan), but it's hard to moderate a forum and at the same time not let it become a monoculture.
I've seen comments claiming that HN is a neoliberal / libertarian cesspool, and I've seen comments claiming that anything mildly non-PC gets downvoted into oblivion. If both the far left and the far right feel like HN represents the "other side's" opinion, then maybe there's a pretty decent middle ground being struck.
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.
As with Cloudflare, ultimately you have to pick a pro- or anti-Fascist stance, because unresponsiveness will leave you pro-Fascist by default.
>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.
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.
How do you know that downvoting is "reflexive" - certainly any time I've been downvoted it was, on reflection, fairly well justified.
I'm at the point now where I immediately hide submissions that seem like they have anything to do with American health care or American transportation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe the response is different because if a man’s achievement is highlighted, the fact that a man did it isn’t highlighted, which isn’t exactly the case for women (apparently a woman in the team suffices for an achievement to be credited to a woman), making these two kinds of articles about fundamentally different things: “X was achieved” vs. “A woman achieved X”. One of these is far more loaded politically and henc…
I could only recommend to the curious readers of HN, if they are interested and certainly if they think they should voice their "strong reaction," to try looking at the rather vast scholarly literature that research has produced over the past decades. It's not a matter of a difference of opinions among people with equal knowledge of the subject matter, but usually one between those who have more knowledge and those who have less.
The article itself was a bit disappointing because it focused on political issues. In my opinion the strength of HN in this regard is that it is both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right", as evidenced by the fact that a comment on a controversial topic can easily float near zero points while raking in both upvotes and downvotes. And even those who refer to it as "the orange site" still come back and comment. In other words, HN may be an echo chamber but it is a pretty big one with a lot of voices in it.
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…
The community helps... but someone needs to be doing some policing to limit the effect of the bad actors or the community starts to get pissed off/wander off/degrade into pettiness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
I've been reading "dang" as the word "dang!" without realising it's actually "dan g" all this time. :)