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The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

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Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#751

Post by [deleted] »

mushufasa wrote: post #615
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/i…

[deleted]

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#752

Post by UnFleshedOne »

billfruit wrote: post #721
candu wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and now we've touched on a fundamental philosophical question: is freedom of speech a natural right or a legal right? There's also potentially an assumption here that free speech is overall reduced through restrictions on it. As a thought experiment: suppose that, within a society of _n_ people, some small _k_ of them are "louditarians": they believe that part of the right to free speech is the inalienable right t…

Yes may be for vocal speech, but for platforms build around written forms of speech like most online forums, how does that analogy hold since then the right of one to say a thing does not restrict another body's right to say a different thing at the same time. Generally freedom of speech issues arise largely for written word, than the spoken word.

This metaphor might be saved if you consider amount of (limited) public attention to be analogy to amplitude of sound. You can softly type in your niche forum all you want, but nobody will hear you if there is somebody else screaming into the twitter megaphone nearby.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#753

Post by Spectral »

celticmusic wrote: post #746
dang wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did I do this? When I get something wrong, I'm happy to admit it and correct it. At the same time, people make all sorts of claims about horrid things we supposedly did, and most of those leave out important information. Either way, if you're going to make claims like this, you should supply links so readers can make up their own minds.

In the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19984428 you state that asking for sources is, and I quote: "a rather unsubstantive contribution". You are now telling me I should be citing a source. If I were being snarky I would ask if you would mind raising your signal/noise ratio as you did with the other poster. I mean, which is it? Is asking to source the claim unsubstantive or not? Is it only unsubsta…

A comment like "got any sources for that?" without adding additional context is low effort and inching towards trolling. Another difference is while the parent post of that person's comment it would be nice to include sources, it is about a general topic people can attempt to look for public sources themselves. Your comment you are accusing a forum user (dang) of something and there is no reasonable way to look for sources backing up your opinion/claim.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#754

Post by segfaultbuserr »

belisarius48 wrote: post #741
dang wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it also considers the karma of the commenters Karma doesn't affect ranking on HN. This comes up often enough that I wonder where the idea came from. Do other forums work this way?

/.

Slashdot karma affects ranking? Good to know.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#755

Post by wvenable »

pluma wrote: post #749
wvenable wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything is political. This is absolutely not true. The best postings on hacker news are cool technical stuff that doesn't have an ounce of political. And yes, there are plenty of articles with a political lean but they are really the least interesting ones here because you can read those anywhere else. I'd much rather read about the guy who built his own video card than what (non-technical) thing Uber is doing t…

Building your own video card is political, sorry. I'm not even kidding. To elaborate: * To get the obvious one out of the way: it's something you need sufficient free time, money and knowledge in order to even do, so the author likely comes from a certain amount of privilege which colors his experience. * Building a video card is in itself only possible due to the existence of open standards and free access to the re…

No, an article about building your own video card is not political. Admittedly, if an article about building a video card went into opinions on open standards, included anti-consumerist comments, talked about legal considerations then it would be political to a varying degree. But an article about building a video card in of itself does not have to mention any of that and would therefore be non-political.

If everything is political then the word political has no meaning.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#756

Post by dang »

ckris wrote: post #679
noobermin wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I'm aware of the device your talking about. They did that for sure for dang and sctb's character to highlight how they in particular buck the stereotype but throughout the piece the author makes it clear their focus was essentially on the fringe of comments that occur on this site and how they fit into a larger narrative about silicon valley culture. I provided the quote because it is specific evidence t…

> I provided the quote because it is specific evidence the author approached the writing with this perspective towards the site, and should one be totally surprised it is the dominant narrative throughout? At least partly that is about being topical for their audience. What I am trying to point out is that just because it is written from a different perspective or for a different audience doesn't mean that it is wron…

> That certain topics can't be discussed because they disappear from view is a defining characteristic of Hacker News

What topics are those? When I hear claims like this, it usually turns out to be a topic that gets plenty of discussion on HN—just not as much as someone feels it should. It never feels like one's favorite topic gets discussed enough (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for why), but that's not "it can't be discussed".

> But on Hacker News it has always been justified by it not being moderation.

We answer questions about moderation all day. When asked what happened to a submission, we say what happened. If users flagged it we say users flagged it. If we moderated it we say we moderated it. How do you get from that to something sinister?

> "It was flagged by users" is the common explanation.

Yes, because it is the common reason.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#757

Post by dang »

celticmusic wrote: post #743
dang wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue in that case was more the added bit about downvotes, which broke the site guidelines.

The claim of the other poster was accurate. The question of whether you were being fair or not doesn't change that.

It wasn't accurate. They mentioned the lesser part of why I moderated the comment and omitted the greater part, which is what most people do when telling a story about how we suppressed them unfairly. That's presumably why such stories never come with links, which would allow readers to make up their own minds about what happened.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#758

Post by dang »

celticmusic wrote: post #746
dang wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did I do this? When I get something wrong, I'm happy to admit it and correct it. At the same time, people make all sorts of claims about horrid things we supposedly did, and most of those leave out important information. Either way, if you're going to make claims like this, you should supply links so readers can make up their own minds.

In the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19984428 you state that asking for sources is, and I quote: "a rather unsubstantive contribution". You are now telling me I should be citing a source. If I were being snarky I would ask if you would mind raising your signal/noise ratio as you did with the other poster. I mean, which is it? Is asking to source the claim unsubstantive or not? Is it only unsubsta…

A comment consisting of nothing but "got any sources for that?" is certainly "rather unsubstantive". But that is not why I replied to it. Had that been the only thing wrong with the comment, I wouldn't have. It was the following:

> Edit: lol, downvotes for asking for sources? "Hacker" "news" is just full of gems!

... that caused me to reply as a moderator, because that breaks more than one of the site guidelines, as well as being lame. This is routine moderation.

Both the original commenter and now you have given a distorted version of what happened there, as anyone who looks at the original thread can easily see. If that's what you have to resort to in order to come up with examples of moderator abuse on HN, we must be doing pretty well. Better than I'd have expected, in fact, given that we've posted 38,000 of these and no one bats a hundred.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#759

Post by cmroanirgo »

celticmusic wrote: post #704
cmroanirgo wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure what you mean, the link you posted showed itself to be 100% accurate with the claim.

The claim is lopsided. @dang implies how the original comment wasn't all that great... but wasn't a real problem, & it wasn't until the comment was edited to include the downvotes that @dang intervened. That the commenter re-raised the issue again here as the reason for @dang intervening in the first place seems to be incorrect, as I read it.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#760

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #738
TelmoMenezes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what you mean by "suspicious." I mean that, maybe you should distrust your own judgement that "HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". Perhaps other places have environments that you don't like but other people feel that they are "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". > I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all…

> I will not disclose it because I do not want to ruin it I'm glad your favorite community has sustained itself for 20 years, but with this statement you remove it so far from the category HN belongs to that it's incommensurable. It's great that there's room for lots of different internet communities to thrive with different strategies. I've always felt there's room for many more—there are lots of opportunities for c…

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