Sounds less Asian than I had assumed.
Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
121–130 of 170 posts
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#122Long live the benevolent dictator
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha yeah I was making fun of the (many) people who think this is some kind of noble labor of love.
It is OK to compliment people for their good work, you don't have to work for free to receive praise.
I don’t disagree. That doesn’t change the fact that many people don’t understand what HN is.
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#124So as it turns out the key to making Twitter less crap is leveraging Daniel Gackle clones.
I think the community here is the other part of the equation. I see HN as a gigantic spinning apparatus that occasionally gets out of alignment by a few microns. Dan simply adds a bit of corrective force in a few areas as appropriate to keep everything happy. Twitter is a bunch of pigs wallowing in a pit of mud by comparison. You could put a million dangs in there and they would still wind up as muddy as everyone els…
To clean Twitter, wouldn't it be enough to let people create filter groups, kind of like Brave Goggles [1] that are lists of accounts or lists of lists of accounts
?
People would cluster themselves into groups with consistent values and you would just need some moderators for minor adjustments.
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#125'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…
The one complaint is this: > He has had a habit of silencing some long-standing members of HN If anything, that shows excellent moderation skills. Everyone should abide by the same rules.
Yup. The tricky bit of moderation to me is dealing with well known, long term users. I find the particularly troublesome sort being people who have a good amount of contributions to their name, but a variable temper. If somebody's always a jerk that's pretty easy. The tricky bit is when it's inconsistent.
Other long term community members learn what sets this person off and avoid it, and so everything seems quiet for weeks until somebody unaware hits on just the wrong subject, and this old, seemingly respected member explodes at them.
This is problematic for a community. New people need to either learn to navigate this minefield, or decide that it's not worth it and leave. And a lot will definitely pick the second option.
I ended up banning just a few such people and I'd say things have improved greatly as a result. Yes, there's a loss in term of contribution from very skilled people, but if a single person sours the mood for several dozen, it's not a good tradeoff. And they tend to drive away other skilled people as well, who can easily leave and be welcome must anywhere else that doesn't require them to tiptoe around that one tricky person.
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
i wonder what tool dang uses to see comment replies and respond ? the ycombinator web UI does not encourage real-time or even near-time responses.
To my knowledge, there is a combination of specific views on the site that highlight important features of the site (an obvious example might be the list of flagged comments; a less-obvious example might be https://news.ycombinator.com/topcomments which shows the top-most comment of each front page item) as well as email alerts from a variety of sources, some of those being user-driven.
in order to read your reply to my comment, i had to :
- click on my user name
- click on comments
- search/scroll to this thread and see your reply
I don't get notified of comment replies like on reddit. there is no slack/email page of DMs/PMs.
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#127Well if he’s busy banning people for political ideologies when in reality he’s running a message board with the technology from 1995
HN isn't the place for politics. If I was a zealous liberal or a zealous right wing nutjob I'd imagine I'd get roughly equal treatment.
> HN isn't the place for politics.
It seems that if the politics meet a certain criteria, they are allowed ad nauseam. You also see where certain names are allowed to say things where others are chastised for the rebuttal of said things.
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
There is however a big difference in the legitimacy of restrictions. The reality is that their are many unreasonable people on the Internet. Most unreasonable people however think of themselves as reasonable and other similarly unreasonable people as reasonable as well. There are also some reasonable people on the Internet. So how do you know which one you are? When we can't assume one or the other we have to look at…
It would basically be impossible for a site like HN to silence anyone. There are many other highly-visible places to break news even if dang wants to cover something up. It's not remotely the same as if the government were to impose restrictions on speech.
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#129For those not wanting to be forced to login or don't have an account to read comments: https://nitter.net/paulg/status/1282055086433284103
Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
#130Earlier 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.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what FB and Twitter are trying to do.
Not sure how well it's working out.
I hear constant stories about how "blunt instrument" these are, and how it's impossible to appeal.