The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News • Hacker News Board

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#341

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 3:56 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #112

danso wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 down…

Yet, it happens all the time. For this example, the most likely explanation is the down-voters read the first two words and wrongly concluded that the remaining 1000 were going to be a racist rant. Within milliseconds they made the decision to downvote and move on.

This "drive by down-voting" happens regularly here. I've had comments downvoted within seconds of posting--clearly the voters could not have had time to read the entire text. They see a few key words that trigger them, hit the arrow, and move on to the next job. Unfortunately, there's no way in JavaScript to tell whether someone's actually read the thing they're down-voting, so we get these knee-jerk keyword-based brigades.

To test this, sometimes I'll write something where the first sentence is provocative, but the rest is (I hope) a solid, nuanced argument. Usually it's at -1 or -2 within a minute, and then over the next few hours slowly crawls back up to +2 or +3 as people actually read it.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#342

Post by nkurz » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 3:57 PM UTC

whiteopinions wrote: post #313

nkurz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For starters, why did you choose this username? From your comments it seems like you've been here for a while. Why a new account?

Because I like the username. What's wrong with it? >Why a new account? Because I wanted the username.

> What's wrong with it?

Well, it's certainly going to cause many people to discount your opinion because they presume you have an racist agenda. It looks like a username consciously chosen to create offense while being plausibly deniable. Please be cautious of causing harm to a community for sake of social commentary. Needlessly creating offense is a negative, but maybe you can figure out how to use the dissonance to turn it into a net positive.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#343

Post by wozniacki » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 3:58 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #251

rusk wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right" both and neither. Partisan discussions, or even any kind of bitching at all ... are outright discouraged. I often step out of line in this regard and don't always agree, but I'm also confident that folk on "the other side" face the same kind of treatment. Though frustrating at times, I respect that it keeps things clean and helps cut out a lot of nonsense, of which…

It's always interesting to see a light-grey thread at the bottom of a page that's full of lucid, not-overly-aggressive political discussion. In one sense it's a shame when thoughtful, evidence-based discussion is discouraged for being off-topic. But I suspect that's ultimately what makes those discussions possible; they're happening between relatively small numbers of discussants, in a space that doesn't draw in peop…

   In one sense it's a shame when thoughtful, evidence-
   based discussion is discouraged for being off-topic. But
   I suspect that's ultimately what makes those discussions  
   possible;

No.

Thoughtful, evidence-based discussion should never be discouraged or deemed off-topic - no matter how sensitive the topic. ( People reading this, even 10-15 years on, might find the mores of this age whimsical, at best. )

The only reason one might find thoughtful, evidence-based discussion off-putting is to be on the good side of David Geffen in the hopeful attempt that he or she might be might be invited to luxuriate on his super-yacht, one day.

There's never a better reason than that to be economical with the truth.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#344

Post by jfengel » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 3:58 PM UTC

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…

The moderators help determine the community. Insufficient moderation changes the community: the most obnoxious voices drive away reasonable ones. New users who prefer that mode of discourse stay; users who want "reasonable discussion" are discouraged and go elsewhere.

It's easy when a community is small. The more prominent the community gets, the more it tempts people who enjoy stirring things up.

In the end I'm not sure if any moderation scheme can prevent that, to be honest. There will always be people who consider it a challenge to see what they can get away with, either by trying to stay just under the moderators' radar or by returning every time they're banned. Provocation makes people defensive, and then their own replies turn harsh, contributing to a negative perception of the community.

I do hope that this community avoids it as long as possible. I've discovered it only recently and am enjoying it. But past experience suggests that it, too, will one day degrade.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#345

Post by ckris » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 3:58 PM UTC

meowface wrote: post #319

I think it's all our own fault if we ever expected expert political philosophy or scientific debate from a group of people who mostly just, at the end of the day, program websites and phone apps. A high percentage of IT, software engineering, and professional advice on HN is very valuable, but the percentage of other kinds of commentary that's valuable is much lower. I occasionally also get sucked into the sorts of d…

You can have a good discussion with it being an expert discussion. Hacker News largely has neither. It really appeals to people who like, or at least can stand, the noise. As the articles says it is its own thing, but it isn't unique as phenomenon. There are many parallels to other forms of consumption, like that of sports or reality television where people create their own reality.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#346

Post by minimaxir » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 3:59 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #189

w-m wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304326

That page was last updated October 2018, but the dataset itself (`bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`) is up to date and continually updating.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#347

Post by nkurz » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #334

meowface wrote: post #319

I think it's all our own fault if we ever expected expert political philosophy or scientific debate from a group of people who mostly just, at the end of the day, program websites and phone apps. A high percentage of IT, software engineering, and professional advice on HN is very valuable, but the percentage of other kinds of commentary that's valuable is much lower. I occasionally also get sucked into the sorts of d…

To save you some scrolling: if you click the little [-] the thread will collapse. I've campaigned to make the default an all-collapsed page but it did not get much support.

Arguably, by putting the comments on a separate page they already are collapsed by default. Going to the comments page signifies that one wants to view the comments. Why do you think a further level of collapsing would be beneficial? Would you expand things once they are upvoted, or always require an additional click to view the deeper levels?

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#348

Post by pessimizer » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

> “Almost every post deals with the same topics: these are people who spend their lives trying to identify all the ways they can extract money from others without quite going to jail[...]”

A money quote for me, but it's not inclusive of the angry bystander programmers raging about externalities and corruption, and the employees trying to figure out a way that they can ethically stay employed when their boss (and probably their company's business model) is this. HN is all three.

Less so with time, though, it was once a more equal mix.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#349

Post by curtis » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #317

rusk wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right" both and neither. Partisan discussions, or even any kind of bitching at all ... are outright discouraged. I often step out of line in this regard and don't always agree, but I'm also confident that folk on "the other side" face the same kind of treatment. Though frustrating at times, I respect that it keeps things clean and helps cut out a lot of nonsense, of which…

I LOVE this paragraph. God-damn nails the problems of HN (and other tech-heavy web communities) like nothing else... > The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition— > hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative— > often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; > thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as > emotional or irrational. Logic, applied na…

There's a lot of the author's opinion embedded in that paragraph, and I'm disinclined to agree with it, but ... no wait -- was that paragraph generated by a Markov bot trained to make substanceless attacks on opinions that the author doesn't like?

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#350

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

afarrell wrote: post #231

FussyZeus wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually my sole complaint with HN. I love the community and I understand where the moderators are coming from, but I feel that it's important to point out that the position of "keep politics out of $X" is the purest expression of privilege, and in general is an attitude that embraces the status quo, no matter how horrifying it might be for the unprivileged. I'm not saying HN should allow ALL political discus…

Something can be both an expression of privilege and a very good idea. Example: The advice to get at least 8 hours of sleep at a regular time each night. This reflects: - the economic privilege of not needing to do irregular shift work - not having a chronic disease which interrupts sleep - not being a parent - having a regular place to sleep at all. However, it is still a good idea for one’s physical and mental heal…

[deleted]