I want to just say that I really appreciate the work that the hn mods do: thank you and keep up the good work!
The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
181–190 of 812 posts
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#182Earlier 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.
I fat-finger a lot, especially on mobile where these tiny little arrows are a challenge. And one thing I notice is that since both the arrows disappear, you're never quite sure if you did. You have to question your fat fingers yourself, and if you're unsure, Undo gives you the option to take a second shot. But you're never entirely sure.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#183If the author is reading this, I would really enjoy hearing what the story pitch process for this was like. Even if it punches above its weight in terms of "mindshare", HN is still niche as far as tech subjects go. And, in terms of online communities, boring as hell compared to Reddit, 4/8chans, and even Usenet. The angle of focusing on the two human mods – particularly in the context of contemporary online content b…
She has written several posts about Silicon Valley culture before, both for the New Yorker and other publications—I learned about her work back in 2016, on N+1. I recommend reading it, it was quite fun and depressing at the same time: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#184Hacker 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,…
> 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.
What you are asking for would take significantly more resources. I appreciate what you are saying, but all I ask is that a site be consistent. If it is consistently moderated, I as a user can vote with my feet (or my clicks in this case) if I approve or disapprove of the job that is being done.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#185Hacker 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,…
> 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.
Isn't every community -barring a few wild west's- like that? One Usenet, someone with an unpopular opinion would end up in people's kill file. On IRC, someone with an unpopular opinion would end up on people's ignore or would get kicked off the channel or klined off the server. Except for the kick and kline the effect of a kill file or ignore is akin to a global shadow ban.
The solution to the problem you mentioned is that unpopular opinions with merit will find their way to become eventually popular enough that they're adopted. Whereas unpopular opinions without merit eventually end up existing on the cesspits of the Internet. Because somewhere on the Internet, any person can spout their unpopular opinion. The question is, who reads it? Is it so much different from a shadow ban?
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#186How do you know their names, how do you know there are only 2? One of the problems for me about HN is the secretive nature of moderation.
It's right there in the article.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#187How do you know their names, how do you know there are only 2? One of the problems for me about HN is the secretive nature of moderation.
Because 2T1Qka0rEiPr read the article :-)
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#188I guess it is a perfect opportunity to thank dang and sctb for their unobtrusive and friendly moderation efforts. 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 rakin…
dang, the liberal groupthink thought policeman who silences anyone who doesn’t agree with his liberal social justice agenda. I can’t imagine a worse moderator.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#189Interesting that only 2 people can moderate million users
As the article goes "The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns.", let's see what we can do here. The latest HN comment dump I could find with a quick search was from May 2018 [1]. There were 237,646 comments in total that month, made by 36,358 unique users. 75% of users posted 5 or fewer comments, with a median of 2. The most…
The "official" dataset on BigQuery seems to have been last updated in October 2018:
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#190Hacker 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,…
> 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. What you are asking for would take significantly more resources. I appreciate what you are saying, but all I ask is that a site be consistent. If it is consistently moderated, I as a user can vote with my feet (or my clicks in this case) if I ap…
Yes, I would only recommend it for the monopoly platform companies (Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc.) and backbone companies (ISPs, Cloudflare!, etc.)