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The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

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Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#161

Post by ckris »

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.)

2019 is the year when reality caught up with the Internet in a way that it hasn't since before social media. Internet culture was never really about unequivocally accepting things, but about thinking for yourself. The need to rationalize the Internet only happened once the Internet started to mean money. Which resulted in many holding opinions that are more the idea of an idea, rather than the idea itself. That will usually mean, at least perceived, "flip-flopping" once something is challenged. And that is to some extent what is happening now.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#162

Post by sokoloff »

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?

I don't see the moderation here as particularly strict nor as the original source of all the goodness.

I think having the right set of rules for the site's discussion (maintaining of which is a moderator job) and having a generally "good" population as an initial condition were the keys to setting the mods up for success. The mods' job then becomes to maintain the community's high level of discourse.

I see a lot of comments which violate the site guidelines in a fairly minor way. To me, strict moderation would involve curtailing those (to the site's detriment in general, a la Reddit, Wikipedia, or stackoverflow). Instead, I think we have strict guidelines and fairly tolerant moderation thereof. (I also find it interesting and telling that I felt normal to say "we have" in the previous sentence, rather than "news.yc has".)

PS: This is not meant to take anything away from what the mods do. It's critically important and they do a good job from my viewpoint. I think I got my hand slapped once in a decade (and I don't even now recall what it was, but I do recall that I agreed that I deserved it and it was handled reasonably).

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#163

Post by hos234 »

Discussion in todays world is highly over rated.

There are people who build hospitals and there are people who stand around talking about who should build hospitals.

The former group in any population in any country is very small. The latter group is very large and thanks to the current architecture of the internet have gotten so over amplified that they think they actually matter.

Their resumes don't have any actual achievement beyond drawing attention to things. They don't matter. People who are driven to build hospitals will keep building hospitals irrespective of all the "discussions" going on.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#164

Post by romaaeterna »

Hacker News is a well-moderated community, but it's illustrative to see where Hacker News fails at moderation. While Hacker News is great at protecting the community from disruptive individuals, it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob.

I support Hacker News moderating itself however it chooses. However, if we are looking at it as a moderation model for large, open, non-editorial platforms (Youtube, Facebook) -- which I believe should all be covered under public accommodation law -- it clearly fails. And even if when we are looking at ostensibly neutral, publicly-orientated sites like newspaper comment boards, it fails.

Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights.

So while this moderation method succeeds for Hacker News, and perhaps should become the model for small private sites, we should not try to scale it internet-size companies. Platform companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) and backbone companies (ISPs, Cloudflare!) need a different set of rules geared towards protecting individual rights and freedoms instead of protecting a community.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#165

Post by danso »

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…

When I first started commenting, I remember being shocked (and annoyed) at how downvoted I got for making the kind of reply-snark that gets tolerated (if not upvoted) on Reddit – and that tone-setting is certainly a function of the community.

But that was almost a decade ago. The mindset of the tech community has gotten far more political (not a bad thing, but a natural consequence of "software eating the world"), and it's really hard to imagine that HN would have turned out like it is today through self-policing alone.

Even if we assume HN were to collectively agree on taking a hard stance against anything political in nature (which still seems to be the case sometimes, given that the mods have to occasionally step in and manually de-flag and protect threads), that would've likely turned off a number of current HN users who see HN as a great place to discuss tech's greater implications and role in society.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#166

Post by vonmoltke »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #129
vonmoltke wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 down…

There's a counterbalancing option to downvotes and flags - you can "vouch" comments. Enough people using it[0] can make the software unkill a comment provisionally, though doing this puts your own reputation and vouching rights at stake, since according to [0], vouched comments are eventually reviewed manually. -- [0] - Not sure what's the power of a vouch relative to a flag or a downvote, but my impression is that i…

Yes, and I use both when I feel it's appropriate. However, it's still fundamentally a popularity contest rather than guidelines enforcement. If enough people simply don't like what a post has to say it will stay grey/dead.

I'm coming to the opinion that downvoting should not grey out posts, or that there should be some number of downvotes (greater than 1) required before it starts. It should be harder to suppress constructive, on-topic posts just because a bunch of people don't like the point.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#167

Post by epc »

romaaeterna wrote: post #164

Hacker News is a well-moderated community, but it's illustrative to see where Hacker News fails at moderation. While Hacker News is great at protecting the community from disruptive individuals, it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob. I support Hacker News moderating itself however it chooses. However, if we are looking at it as a moderation model for large, open,…

Which "public accommodation law" do you refer to?

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#168

Post by justin66 »

dang and sctb possess admirable patience and persistence but I've always enjoyed dang's posts when he participates in a conversation. I wonder if his time spent serving as a moderator somewhat robs hn of an especially thoughtful poster. Thanks guys.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#169

Post by xtracto »

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…

I agree and want to put /. as an example. In the 2000's I used to visit /. as much as I visit hn now. At that time there were plenty of great comments and sometimes even people like John Carmack posted there. Sure there was GNAA spam and similar, but the mod system took care of that.

Nowadays the mod system remains but the community has moved on and although the stories are good, there is no intellectual discussion.

A similar thing happened to OSNews. Another news aggregator I used to visit a lot.

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