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The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

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Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#521

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

belorn wrote: post #200
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…

A good test to see if a topic make sense to discuss on HN is if people are willing to calmly discuss the merits of it. The author says they are interested in the humanities and like to see articles focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace. I doubt however they want to see article discussing the merits of the topic, i.e. if women does face barriers in the work place. The result is that anyone who d…

That might have few false-positives (being wrong when we say "this is good for HN"), but the false negatives would be huge. There's plenty on topic that still devolves into flame wars. Off the top of my head, these seem clearly on topic but discussion devolves: Vim vs Emacs. Javascript vs anything. Static vs dynamic types. Apple's keyboards. OpenAI.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#522

Post by ssalazar »

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…

> Personally, I would actually consider it an excellent demonstration of the fallibility of one of HN's favourite tropes, Gell-Mann amnesia.

Indeed, I will happily fan-boy for the New Yorker here, they usually succeed in capturing the nuances of topics I happen to be familiar with. Gell-Mann seems more applicable to mass market news outlets; whereas NYer writers will often spend months -> years researching a subject.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#524

Post by rebuilder »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #118
azangru wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

Could you clarify why you thought this? What evidence do you have that supports this? The big thread shows that the top comment agrees that 8chan should be left alone. [0] and the comment chain shows that there seems to be something like a significant minority against 8chan, but it doesn’t appear to be a prevailing majority. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395

Is looking at what the top comment says a good way of gauging consensus? I read that thread and walked away with the impression that the majority view was that "deplatforming" 8chan was mostly OK. This because most of the on-topic comments seemed to hold that viewpoint.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#525

Post by meowface »

pvaldes wrote: post #387
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…

> It's all our own fault if we ever expected expert political philosophy or scientific debate from a group of people who mostly just program websites and phone apps. To be fair, we can expect some diversity among several millions of readers from many different countries, points of view and experience in different fields.

Yes, but the actual experts usually get drowned out pretty quickly.

If HN had some concept of subreddits, even if it were just a few them, the situation might be different. There are quite a few high-quality subreddits out there with a lot of experts. (I don't know if creating "sub-HNs" is a good idea in general; probably not.)

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#527

Post by haberman »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #118
azangru wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

Could you clarify why you thought this? What evidence do you have that supports this? The big thread shows that the top comment agrees that 8chan should be left alone. [0] and the comment chain shows that there seems to be something like a significant minority against 8chan, but it doesn’t appear to be a prevailing majority. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395

Top comment in this big thread argues the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20616055

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#528

Post by [deleted] »

vfc1 wrote: post #493
cowabungacode wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would have left long ago if flagging had continued to be used to kill topics. Flagging is frequently used to kill topics still. Climate change articles are still flagged mercilessly, before any discussion starts and without regard for the high-quality of the articles. dang as a moderator has specifically said that articles about Russia hacking elections are penalized prior to any votes or comments starting (edit:…

This is true, still today I saw a BBC article stating that July was the hottest month recorded - https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49165476?intlin... A minute later I go back to the home page and it was wiped out without a single discussion comment. I don't see any reason why this type of articles should be taken down, they are scientific in nature and highly relevant. Things like climate change denial sho…

[deleted]

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#529

Post by crumpets »

crispyambulance wrote: post #437
AcerbicZero wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about having discussions based on fact is that if "the data" is bad, its just another avenue for discussion. That doesn't mean we have to re-hash everything from first principals, and it certainly doesn't mean that compelling rhetoric + poor data might "win", but it sure does help. People can have a productive discussion on the veracity (origins/malleability are not good reasons to ignore data by thems…

> The nice thing about having discussions based on fact... Certainly that kind of positivist approach is valuable and warranted for much but not all of the subject-matter on HN. If you're discussing technical subject matter, stuff like the inner workings of regular expressions, programming language features, electronic components, sure, it's all about "the facts". Things are different, however, in discussions about h…

Facts still trump everything in all of those categories. You can certainly talk about how those facts can be explained by people's emotional state, historical context, etc., but that doesn't invalidate facts that might demonstrate something is pretty irrational when you look at actual data.

When someone says they are afraid of flying, you show them facts of how safe commercial flight is compared to driving. You don't just quietly sit by while they try to pass legislation making flying illegal.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#530

Post by ckris »

mushufasa wrote: post #455

I liked this article, though I think it missed the best part of Hacker News. To me, Hacker News can feel like walking through Dumbledore's office -- magical and mind-bending collections of incredible devices, ideas, and oddities. Just yesterday someone posted a comment with links to UI design libraries that I've been subconsciously wishing for in my dreams (humaans, undraw.co), and I used it in a product demo. As a s…

In defense of the article, what you are talking about is a different story more "finding the Internet and programming" that isn't really unique to Hacker News. It can surely be used that way, and people likely do, but you can also find those things by searching for "top programming books" (or hanging around twitter, quora, medium or other sites). They did sort of talk about that with the early motivations for Hacker News. And you could absolutely go to a music festival and write about the food trucks, the people and the atmosphere that if that is what unique about that festival. I think they did a good job in that regard. People don't obsessively read Hacker News to help newcomers, they do so because it is all in all a technical tabloid.
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