Seems like a management problem when one employee is expending huge effort to keep the enterprise running.
Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
71–80 of 170 posts
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#72I always assumed "dang" was a placeholder for a small team designed to appear as a single person. Is this not the case?
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#73I always assumed "dang" was a placeholder for a small team designed to appear as a single person. Is this not the case?
It is one person.
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#74Funny thing: I just wrote about this in my blog. [1] Well, sort of.
Many thanks to dang for this ever wonderful forum, the best on the Internet!
[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2022/07/lobste.rs-will-become-an-ech...
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like to think he's some kind of monk, a zen master of human forums, and a genuinely good person. At least any exchange I had with him or observed with all kinds of people have been full of humanity, while firm in his mission. I don't know how he does it, and I wish we'd celebrate him and people like him far more.
I posted a link elsewhere in this thread to this article [1] - The lonely work of moderating Hacker News (2019) - and you might like its author's insights/views, plus there are plentiful quotes from Dang and his colleague, Scott Bell. [edit to add: a comment in reply to this says that Scott no longer works at HN. Surely Dang can't be doing this solo nowadays?] [1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-va…
It's just Dan now, I think. Scott no longer works for HN.
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#76I'd like to think that more than a few people grasp this. He's some kind of machine - in the best, complimentary way. His replies to emails are succinct, helpful, educational, and still personable. No idea how he retains his equanimity across hundreds/thousands of interactions, mostly with strangers. IMO it's a worthwhile lesson (and a free one) to peruse his comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=d…
Echo'd.
Respect and many thanks, dang.
Paul really should fund an AI startup focused on chatboard moderation based solely on learnings-from-dang.
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#77'sillysaurusx -- I respect your opinions. I know that I respect your opinions because you're able to use HackerNews as a bully pulpit to reach a very wide audience and I personally both enjoy and look forward to seeing your participation. I've often wished I had better opportunities to learn from you and always silently wish you well on your personal journey. I also see from your Twitter reply that you feel HN hasn't…
Context that I had to look up: sillysaurusx on HN is theshawwn on Twitter, whose replies to the submitted tweet this is a response to. (What makes that relative clause so hard to parse?) Meta: Is that an apostrophe as a username sigil? Where did it come from? Another instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17681886
I read it as a quotation mark. of course there's no closing mark, but it could be a mistake
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone that moderated a … pithy … community site, I am all too familiar with that type of complaint. I would regularly get called a “nazi,” because I would step into catfights, and break them up, or “nip them in the bud.” Once you’ve been doing it a while, you learn to smell trouble brewing, and it can escalate rapidly. Many folks chafe at restrictions, and they may actually be correct. They, themselves, may be e…
> Once you’ve been doing it a while, you learn to smell trouble brewing, and it can escalate rapidly. I'm not actually proposing this, but that makes me curious how well that could be modeled via deep learning.
There are a lot of projects out there that are attempting to do this because of the impracticability of a human team to deal with the entire torrent of information.
For example https://playvalorant.com/en-us/news/announcements/valorant-v...
> As part of a larger effort to combat disruptive behavior, Riot Games recently updated its Privacy Notice and Terms of Service to allow us to record and evaluate in-game voice communications when a report for that type of behavior is submitted—with the goal of kicking this off in VALORANT first.
I believe it would be quite possible. Text is a bit dryer to work with but has the advantage of being all text.
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly wonder sometimes how it’s physically possible to do what dang does, it seems like such an enormous and Sisyphean task. Sad to see twitter replies complaining about the moderation, because if it wasn’t for the moderation the quality here would be much lower, the moderation is the whole reason those people are attracted to participating here. Respect and many thanks indeed.
As someone that moderated a … pithy … community site, I am all too familiar with that type of complaint. I would regularly get called a “nazi,” because I would step into catfights, and break them up, or “nip them in the bud.” Once you’ve been doing it a while, you learn to smell trouble brewing, and it can escalate rapidly. Many folks chafe at restrictions, and they may actually be correct. They, themselves, may be e…
> Many folks chafe at restrictions, and they may actually be correct.
We're at least a couple decades beyond the point where a reasonable person could possibly entertain such a thought. Lack of restrictions always turns communities into cesspools. They don't necessarily die, but the people that hang out there are the ones that enjoy spending time in cesspools, and that's usually different from the vision the creator of the site had in mind.
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone that moderated a … pithy … community site, I am all too familiar with that type of complaint. I would regularly get called a “nazi,” because I would step into catfights, and break them up, or “nip them in the bud.” Once you’ve been doing it a while, you learn to smell trouble brewing, and it can escalate rapidly. Many folks chafe at restrictions, and they may actually be correct. They, themselves, may be e…
I only recall getting danged once and it was spot-on. I wasn’t acting like a full on flaming ass, but there was at least a glowing ember there and he phrased his response in a way that made it easy to accept.
On an older account I once had a factual comment detached whilst the other person his comment (which pretty much stated the polar opposite) stayed under the main post. Looking at which other comments stayed or got detached it was quite easy to see an enormous bias. Pointing that out, all I got was a vague “I understand you are passionate”. I think that’s the only time I’ve ever seen him miss his stride, though.