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The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

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Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#611

Post by dang »

reactnativedev wrote: post #610
dang wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That thread doesn't say anything like what you claimed it did. Your account is being affected by software penalties that it incurred earlier in the day when you went for full-out ideological battle in this thread. HN has software filters based on past activity by trolls, and after looking at how they were operating on your comments, I believe they were operating correctly. What you're trying to do on this site is not…

[flagged]

That's of course not true, and breaks at least two of the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#612

Post by nkurz »

wpietri wrote: post #571
dang wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change is discussed a great deal on HN these days; probably more than any other topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story... Any topic this widespread is going to produce many copycat and follow…

So pretty clearly I have wildly underestimated the amount that flagging is used to suppress stories. Is there some way for me to see which stories are getting flagged and by how much?

On the site proper, I think flagged stories that have lots of comments are still shown in the Active list (follow the link to Lists at the bottom). But easier may be to view outside sites such as http://hnrankings.info (look for sharp drops in position and lines that end before the right side of the graph) or http://hckrnews.com (look for DEAD in the title or a blank in the number of comments).

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#613

Post by SquareWheel »

dang wrote: post #590
SquareWheel wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In response to your removal message.

Ah, you must be talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258509 . I don't remember that post, and it's possible I didn't see it. I try to read all the replies, but miss a few, especially when they are posted later. If you want to be sure we see something, the only way is to email hn@ycombinator.com. It's also possible that I saw it and was too exhausted to look back through all the flagged comments in the…

Indeed that's the post I meant. Thank you for reviewing it today, and giving your thoughts.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#615

Post by mushufasa »

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…

Since this comment gained traction, here are some better examples of what I meant by dumbledore's office:

A romp through approaches to generative adversarial networks described as if they are realms in a Tolkein world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251308

(This week's) complete guide to building a terminal text editor from scratch in C which gently holds your hand at each step: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14046446

Stumbling down the root domain of the above link leads you to the collected archive of _why_the_lucky_stiff, a hacker artist who created technical documentation as if it were a work of literature, animating and writing songs about ruby in a unique aesop meets kaftka meets neutral milk hotel style, and who then suddenly disappeared and deleted his whole internet persona, transmitting a 96-page oblique missive years later as individual PCL files. https://viewsourcecode.org/why/

Someone documents how using the 30+ year old, tiny awk language let him do what all the latest fad big data tools couldn't https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20293579

Several posts this past week from natashenka's Project Zero blog led me to her passion project of being the world's leading expert in hacking tamagutchis, which read as part instructional and part love letter to digital pets http://natashenka.ca/

Even though I'm ostensibly in the same industry as retail brokerages, I've never understood their business models as well as I did when I read this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276551

Not to keep going, but just to have a less lame example than a couple introductory textbooks -- I didn't mean to imply HN as a surrogate class syllabus

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#616

Post by martincmartin »

dang wrote: post #595
cowabungacode wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have no comment about the censuring you do of topics like Russian election hacking? To me that is the most violating of your duty, that you preemptively reduce conversation on particular topics. You replied in depth to every part of my post except that part. Please explain why you have filters on conversation topics but pretend to be impartial moderators. Does HN have an automatic mechanism to reduce the visib…

I focused on climate change because that is the topic that has the most intensity on HN at the moment. This is a matter of triage. It's incredibly costly in time and energy to write detailed answers like this. We can't do that about everything. If we tried, it would peg us at 100% and starve the rest of the site. No, HN does not "have an automatic mechanism to reduce the visibility on stories relating to Russia's phy…

Thanks dang for your thoughtful and detailed replies. I don't know if it will help the user you're replying to, but I've read all your comments here with interest. They help me understand how to be a better commenter.

Thanks again.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#617

Post by dang »

SquareWheel wrote: post #613
dang wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you must be talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258509 . I don't remember that post, and it's possible I didn't see it. I try to read all the replies, but miss a few, especially when they are posted later. If you want to be sure we see something, the only way is to email hn@ycombinator.com. It's also possible that I saw it and was too exhausted to look back through all the flagged comments in the…

Indeed that's the post I meant. Thank you for reviewing it today, and giving your thoughts.

You're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com if you'd like to discuss it further.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#618

Post by dang »

resters wrote: post #597
dang wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody's "keeping the topics sterile". Threads about "the ugly sides of technology" are common on Hacker News. Of the topics you mention, surveillance is frequently and massively discussed; as for Palantir, https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story... . You may feel it's not enough, but nothing is ever enough: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... .

You have focused on the stories being allowed on HN. My issue is with the aggressive throttling and shadow banning of users who post polite comments in support of unpopular* views (rather than just letting the upvote/downvote system do its job). I'm sure being a mod on HN is difficult, but by punishing users with throttling without explanation is not only rude, it creates the wrong incentive, turning HN into a game o…

Oh, I didn't realize (and if you said it, sorry I missed it) that you were talking about comments rather than submissions. We rate-limit accounts when they have a history of posting too many unsubstantive comments too quickly, and/or getting involved in flamewars. I know it's annoying and a crude tool, but it's one of few ways we have to address that problem in software. If I knew a less rude way to do it, I'd love to replace it. The overwhelming majority of these cases, though, are ones in which accounts really were abusing the site.

We're happy to remove rate-limiting if people email us and give us reason to believe that they won't do those things in the future. Moreover, we take the penalty off accounts when we notice that they've been contributing solidly to HN for a while, as opposed to whatever they did earlier to reduce signal/noise ratio. Not that we catch every case of that.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#619

Post by cmroanirgo »

dang wrote: post #509
craftyguy wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the guidelines are a great way of encouraging us all to be more thoughtful to others comments, and have noticed a difference in the way I might comment HN. The guidelines are somewhat of a joke, and are only followed (even by mods) when it is convenient to do so. For example, I've been repremanded in the past by our supreme leader dang for posting comments like "do you have a source for that?", because he a…

Where did I do that?

Ironically, the source of said admonishment wasn't forthcoming, by GP...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19984428

> Ok, but "got any sources for that?" is a rather unsubstantive contribution, and then going on tilt about getting downvoted breaks the site guidelines outright. Would you mind raising the signal/noise ratio of what you post here?

It seems the attempt to correct a low "signal / noise ratio", in this instance, seems to be back firing.

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