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The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

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Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#791

Post by unimployed »

dang wrote: post #790
unimployed wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China was chosen as the example “agent” in this case because they are a nation that is emblematic of manipulation (in currency, IP theft, free markets, etc.). China was also chosen for the historical imagery, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee while capturing a peacefully sovereign Tibetan territory in 1959 and killing 87,000 directly in the conflict and 430,000 dead in the ensuing occupation. That is to say that China w…

You've made this so general that it applies to literally everyone in every contentious argument. We all have vested interests, deep misunderstandings, strong attachments, personal biases, oversimplifications, and everything else you mention. So in that sense, yes: there's falsehood and misinformation all over the place. But I don't think seeing others as the problem is going to get us very far; seeing others as the p…

That really doesn’t get to the heart of the issue, I’m afraid. It seems to offer a form of cover and protection for views that are known the be problematic and continue to spread. Partisanship and hyper-focus on views corresponding your identify are bad, we should not provide cover for it and partisan views not supported by facts via polite discourse. We should not allow these poorly supported views to spread. It seems HN has no actual stance or response that directly addresses this issue. Some of HN’s guidelines provide shelter for enabling unsupported views. Choosing to the focus the light inwards on yourself doesn’t really solve or address this issue in the modern age of misinformation, and the Tibetan analogy was chosen to illustrate the dangers by turning inward too much and ignoring the dangers. Does that make sense? I think I’m being fairly direct and specific here.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#792

Post by gigama »

"They are hopeful that, as Hacker News continues to grow, it will become, simultaneously, more diverse, more interesting, and more humane, while remaining in some fundamental sense a single community with a common goal."

Right on. Greatly value this melting pot of diverse views and links that often lead to serendipitous discovery, clever ideas, and considered thought. What I originally hoped the internet would turn out to be.

So in case no one's said it in awhile, thank you to Paul Graham for starting and sustaining this outlet for reckless thought experiments, and to Scott and Daniel for their devoted management to herding all us feral cats. Keep up the good work!

Now back to the lab to continue coding my dueling libertarian Markov bots...

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#793

Post by lazyasciiart »

dang wrote: post #784
lazyasciiart wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't shadow-ban accounts unless they're new and show evidence of spamming or trolling, or unless there's evidence that the user has been serially creating accounts to abuse HN. That's a complete contradiction of the explanation you gave at the time. And yes, I asked what had happened when I noticed the account was shadowbanned, and your response was ---------- Hacker News Aug 31, 2018, 10:43 PM to me Politlcal/…

I've taken a look, and this was a case of what I said: we shadowban accounts when they're new and show evidence of spamming or trolling. In your case, the account was new and had repeatedly broken the site guidelines (using HN for political battle and being aggressive to other users). That's evidence of trolling, which is one of the situations where we shadowban. I mentioned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17358…

Oh cry me a river. "I couldn't be stuffed making more than a token effort, and here's all the excuses for why I shouldn't have to. We had no way of knowing anything about you! There were only five comments on that account, and it had existed for such a short time, that I couldn't even read the very first couple of comments that said this is the continuation of an existing account! All trolls look like that!"

And wow, give the pop psychology a rest. "I just don't understand why condescendingly shitting on people makes them angry so I've decided they are probably taking out their childhood issues on me." Yea, it couldn't possibly be actually aimed at you.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#794

Post by dang »

unimployed wrote: post #791
dang wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've made this so general that it applies to literally everyone in every contentious argument. We all have vested interests, deep misunderstandings, strong attachments, personal biases, oversimplifications, and everything else you mention. So in that sense, yes: there's falsehood and misinformation all over the place. But I don't think seeing others as the problem is going to get us very far; seeing others as the p…

That really doesn’t get to the heart of the issue, I’m afraid. It seems to offer a form of cover and protection for views that are known the be problematic and continue to spread. Partisanship and hyper-focus on views corresponding your identify are bad, we should not provide cover for it and partisan views not supported by facts via polite discourse. We should not allow these poorly supported views to spread. It see…

Of course people post "unsupported views". We don't ban users for being wrong—who would be left if we did?—and we don't have a truth machine.

When people argue like this, in my experience, what they mostly want is for us to ban the views they disagree with. We can't do that. Running a complex community like HN is nowhere near that simple.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#795

Post by unimployed »

dang wrote: post #794
unimployed wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really doesn’t get to the heart of the issue, I’m afraid. It seems to offer a form of cover and protection for views that are known the be problematic and continue to spread. Partisanship and hyper-focus on views corresponding your identify are bad, we should not provide cover for it and partisan views not supported by facts via polite discourse. We should not allow these poorly supported views to spread. It see…

Of course people post "unsupported views". We don't ban users for being wrong—who would be left if we did?—and we don't have a truth machine. When people argue like this, in my experience, what they mostly want is for us to ban the views they disagree with. We can't do that. Running a complex community like HN is nowhere near that simple.

I agree that is not a good reason to ban everyone that is simply mistaken. But I have seen users flag one another for absolutely no reason other than they dislike their views being colored as incorrect, or dishonest when the behavior is repeated again and again. That is rather absurd and provides shelter for ignorance. I’m sure those people are very intelligent in their actual area of expertise, but their immaturity shows through in other areas and it’s rather toxic to witness a mod stepping in to say their pride has higher priority than letting someone directly confront their ignorance with facts and truth. Yes this is the internet, we all have better things we could do with our time than debate with strangers. However this also one of the most intellectual and influential havens for discussing tech and nearly anything else found to be interesting.

Modern times have also brought on about a host of new issues where technology can be both beneficial and a detriment to society. The rapid spread of misinformation is a major technological and social issue. How are we going to navigate the new era that is becoming more complex, conflicts are increasing, and people are becoming more partisan and incorrectly reinforced because technology and modern life makes it very easy to filter out the inconvenient facts that they need not be confronted with?

My point is we should not be assisting the enablement of misinformation. Being a hotbed for powerful people and powerful ideas, there is a certain amount of responsibility that needs to be accepted in preventing the spread of misinformation. Rules of discourse that prevent resolutions is something I believe is harmful rather than helpful at HN, and enables the spread of misinformation.

Alternatively, those that don’t like an atmosphere where less than well informed views are actually challenged may very well choose to leave on their own accord, and they will no longer be spreading misinformation here. Bans are probably not needed at all really, we just shouldn’t be enabling.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#796

Post by whalabi »

whalabi wrote: post #778
PaulHoule wrote: post #698

One thing the article got wrong is that the Hacker News community is not limited to Silicon Valley. For instance, the person who has the highest karma is in Brazil. Very few of the people I have met on Hacker News are in the Valley and San Francisco, but I have met people from North Carolina, Philadelphia, Portugal, India, Singapore, ... If you're interested in both technology and business and you've had enough of th…

Australia here, the entire tech industry in this country reads HN

(ok that's exaggeration but you get the idea)

Very commonplace, especially at large tech firms.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#797

Post by peterwwillis »

dang wrote: post #782
peterwwillis wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By applying a process to begin identifying the needs for moderation and developing automated solutions. Later, designs can be modified to remove the need for the automation.

I feel like this begs the question. How do we develop automated solutions? This seems much harder to me than it appears to seem to you.

Well granted it's not something you can finish in a weekend. A lot of things seem hard because they're difficult to imagine at the beginning. Who in the past would have guessed that in the future we'd all be running around in carriages whose front part literally explodes 25 times per second?

From a general standpoint, we develop automated solutions by following new product development[1]. More specifically, we develop features for users to provide different kinds of feedback, and write functions that combine that feedback with machine learning to perform actions when necessary.

Even more specifically, the entirety of forum interaction is an input/output of information in people's brains, computed along with emotion, heuristics, and whatever knowledge the brain has, and generates output. By collecting meta-information about the input and output (such as crowdsourced content flags like category of information, perceived intent of a comment, training data models on old content, etc) we can make functions that use the metadata to perform actions, such as auto-detaching threads, muting users, delaying reply buttons, providing feedback to commenters, and highlighting or shadowing content. A lot of these are already done (some automated, some not), but I think the big feature is when these are done; find the emotional pain points, provide functions that mitigate them based on metadata.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_product_development

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#798

Post by resters »

unimployed wrote: post #795
dang wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course people post "unsupported views". We don't ban users for being wrong—who would be left if we did?—and we don't have a truth machine. When people argue like this, in my experience, what they mostly want is for us to ban the views they disagree with. We can't do that. Running a complex community like HN is nowhere near that simple.

I agree that is not a good reason to ban everyone that is simply mistaken. But I have seen users flag one another for absolutely no reason other than they dislike their views being colored as incorrect, or dishonest when the behavior is repeated again and again. That is rather absurd and provides shelter for ignorance. I’m sure those people are very intelligent in their actual area of expertise, but their immaturity…

> Rules of discourse that prevent resolutions is something I believe is harmful rather than helpful at HN, and enables the spread of misinformation.

Very well put. This is my biggest concern as well. HN mods prevent resolution by punishing participants in back and forth discussion for being part of a “flame war”. It is an incredibly coarse and un-nuanced view of debate.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#799

Post by diminoten »

dang wrote: post #774
diminoten wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being downvoted because you're hitting on a trope/cliche that's called out in the rules, and while I doubt HN is dying from a user engagement perspective, I do believe the comments are less filled with value than they have been in the past, given how negativity dang sees conflict. Healthy conflict is good, but I've participated in healthy conflict here and was stopped by dang because of it.

> I've participated in healthy conflict here and was stopped by dang because of it. Where did I do that?

The majority of the time you've killed my comments.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

#800

Post by dang »

resters wrote: post #798
unimployed wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that is not a good reason to ban everyone that is simply mistaken. But I have seen users flag one another for absolutely no reason other than they dislike their views being colored as incorrect, or dishonest when the behavior is repeated again and again. That is rather absurd and provides shelter for ignorance. I’m sure those people are very intelligent in their actual area of expertise, but their immaturity…

> Rules of discourse that prevent resolutions is something I believe is harmful rather than helpful at HN, and enables the spread of misinformation. Very well put. This is my biggest concern as well. HN mods prevent resolution by punishing participants in back and forth discussion for being part of a “flame war”. It is an incredibly coarse and un-nuanced view of debate.

Most back-and-forth discussion here doesn't get moderated. The ones that do are not the kind that usually end in resolution.
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