The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News • Hacker News Board

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#371

Post by fouc » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #344

ekianjo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

HN has been around a looooong time now. Sure, some people will pine for the good old days, but as far as I'm concerned, HN is fairly stable.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#372

Post by minimaxir » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

raldi wrote: post #362

minimaxir wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll down to the very bottom of that discussion thread and unfurl the flagged threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19634262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19632301

The comments on that story were nothing like the impression any reader would get from the reporter's description. Again: "users combed through her code on GitHub" Reality: One user, in a detached, downvoted, flagged, dead comment invisible to 99% of visitors to the site posted a link to an image analyzing her GH contributions, and was immediately and widely rebuked.

I was in that thread while it was active: it took awhile for those discussions to become "detached, downvoted, flagged, dead".

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#373

Post by ohaideredevs » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

dunkelheit wrote: post #147

I 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…

Don't know sctb, but I have had run-ins with dang on multiple occasions where he asked me to stop arguing when I felt I wasn't being hostile. Nonetheless, it's always in a very moderate tone of doing his job, rather than trying to express power, and I respect that. (Nor am I implying that I didn't take the arguments too far, in some cases I did)

The real proof that they do their job though is that I can still occasionally fine deep insights here that just aren't available in other places.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#374

Post by dorgo » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:30 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.

Just tried:

[].slice.call( document.querySelectorAll( '.togg' ) ).forEach( x => x.click() )

It's really slow. Takes 5-10 seconds for 100 comments. Maybe I just need one of these new AMD processors.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#375

Post by raldi » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:32 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #372

raldi wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comments on that story were nothing like the impression any reader would get from the reporter's description. Again: "users combed through her code on GitHub" Reality: One user, in a detached, downvoted, flagged, dead comment invisible to 99% of visitors to the site posted a link to an image analyzing her GH contributions, and was immediately and widely rebuked.

I was in that thread while it was active: it took awhile for those discussions to become "detached, downvoted, flagged, dead".

That's not what the capture at the Internet Archive appears to show:

http://web.archive.org/web/20190411122008/https://news.ycomb...

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#376

Post by 4ntonius8lock » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

Some heroes don't wear capes, and I believe our moderators here are heroes.

Providing a platform for free expression and creative thinking.

It's truly a noble pursuit. I can't imagine the personal toll of moderating people's baser instincts (my own included)

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#377

Post by ymAg » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

I'm not an unconditional HN fan (avid reader of n-gate), but the article is just a silly covert hit piece against the evil nerd morlocks (who of course build the infra that the NewYorker Eloi use to distribute their vapid opinions).

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#378

Post by crispyambulance » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

cloakandswagger wrote: post #369

dhshahsndeisjwn wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, specifically they say: > The most admired arguments are made with data, > but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data > tend to be ancillary concerns. That's a concern I often share: "the data" can so often be a "winner's history".

Data is the best tool we have. It can be cherry-picked and tainted for sure, but I'd much prefer debates be governed by that instead of whose argument is the most "humane"/morally superior

    > prefer debates be governed by [cherry-picked data] instead of whose argument is the most "humane"

To be overly generous, that's a false dichotomy.

There's a time and place for humane arguments and, in the absence of complete "data" (whatever THAT means), that may be all you have. At the end of the day, we're all emotional creatures and this often justifiably dominates considerations of human affairs. Not everything can be boiled down to problems in first order logic.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#379

Post by cgriswald » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

nkurz wrote: post #347

jacquesm wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I wouldn’t mind seeing sub threads collapsed by default. (Of course I could always do that myself.) It would make for a cleaner page. I could scan the top level comments for interest subtopics/responses, and it would discourage thread-jacking.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#380

Post by ckris » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

cloakandswagger wrote: post #352

crispyambulance wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That paragraph is a smug, flowery dismissal of the kind of evidence-based discussion that happens on HN. It's passive aggressively accusing HN commenters of wrongthink and of abusing unreliable tools like "data" and "logic" to counter "humane arguments" (read: emotional arguments). It basically dismisses the role of data in debate by suggesting that it is malleable or selective--we've all probably encountered this ty…

That seems like a huge straw man. What they say is that people use data improperly on Hacker News, which is also my experience. Very frequently things like papers posted as supporting evidence don't really support the posters position. Sometimes they don't say even remotely what the poster thinks. But that takes time to figure it out, at that point it has already fulfilled its purpose and people don't care anymore.

The structure of Hacker News just makes it very favorable to muddy the waters until the story disappears. And I think they correctly call that out in the article.