61–70 of 75 posts
* Records Retention * Archival Strategy * Digital Preservation and Perpetual Retention, and * Succession Planning for Information Assets.
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This problem has recurred throughout history. The issue with the "study this person who does it well, take notes, it takes a village!" approach is that that quicky ossifies into a bureaucratic morass of petty tyrants who don't actually understand (or care about) the principles behind whatever that person did. They instead engage in endless rules lawyering about technical minutiae. Some do it simply to feel powerful;…
approach is that that quicky ossifies into a bureaucratic morass of petty tyrants Agreed, I see that happen all the time, especially with chat platforms for some reason. That's why I also said discipline . Having run large forums the temptation to make rules and power-trip is human nature. The biggest battle is with ones self and not letting others help moderate unless they share the same discipline. Finding people t…
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis
Dang is good at a lot of moderator things, but his best attribute is that he seems to be capable of disentangling his own personal views on a topic from enforcement of objective norms of decency and respect. Less than 1% of people can do that; they prefer to bludgeon people with technicalities in order to enforce their own views -- and most believe that they are doing good when they do it.
I have been part of many online communities. To name a few, the old Usenet, Slashdot, IWETHEY, Perlmonks, and HN. I long ago accepted that all die at some point. And something new will be created. The new will never be the same as the old. But the fundamental problems are social, not technical. Your mirror platform is an idea that I've seen tried multiple times, and I've only seen work once. That was when the InfoWor…
I agree it is community that makes a space. And HN has been holding on to their for quite a while now.
I worry about this myself. I feel like HN is the last refuge of what the old Internet was supposed to be like. I'm not sure it can be replicated. The future of the Internet seems to me to be small private "hidden" communities and mega platforms filled with garbage. No room for a middle Maybe a paid platform?
> the last refuge of what the old Internet was supposed to be like. What, how? HN is one of the most squeaky clean - corpo - heavily moderated sites with a extreme bubble centered around SV tech. Its basically the exact opposite of the old internet.
USENET was not only every bit as bad as the worst of 4chan -- it was worse, because there was no effective moderation.
That said, there was also a large "signal" component in the "old internet" that is now lacking in most of the New Internet. Places like HN remain as lonely outposts of that lost world, where people wrote in entire paragraphs, to convey complex and meaningful ideas for mutual discussion -- rather than just firing punchy little 140 character epithets and 10 second insta-videos off into the void and then forgetting about them, moving on to the next flash in the goldfish attention span pan.
That level of sustained, complex actually seems like it was more common on the "old Internet," even recognizing fully that the "old Internet" was also overflowing with dross and garbage.
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approach is that that quicky ossifies into a bureaucratic morass of petty tyrants Agreed, I see that happen all the time, especially with chat platforms for some reason. That's why I also said discipline . Having run large forums the temptation to make rules and power-trip is human nature. The biggest battle is with ones self and not letting others help moderate unless they share the same discipline. Finding people t…
The ones who are power-tripping are bad. The ones who genuinely believe that their rules-lawyering is actually good and beneficial for the whole community are even worse. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupid…
I could not have said it better myself. That is a perfect description of what makes this a unique site.
Thank you all and thank you dang.
I also recently joined Lobsters which is also another on my reading schedule.
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> intelligent people [...] was the primary population of many (most?) websites. Oh sweet summer child.
GP post is correct in the general sense that the Internet used to be a thing only accessible to researchers at major universities; and therefore a place where everyone could be assumed to have some basic level of technical knowledge (if not common sense), and to consider themselves "an intellectual" of some kind or another. GP post is technically incorrect, though, in that during this time, the web didn't exist yet.…
Change is inevitable, and going to extreme lengths to preserve the current status quo is almost never worth it. Consider the recent death of Twitter, which seemed so real that tweets were being routinely embedded in news articles. I personally spent a lot of time there, but when it became unusable for me I moved on, to discord communities and bluesky. These are not the same, they are not a twitter-replacement per se,…
Twitter is not dead; it rather caters to a different and broader audience segment now. What happened is that it is no longer an institutionally governed "safe space" where only leftist progressive views are allowed to be voiced in public, and any dissenting views were censored. The segment of people who think that applying that sort of leftist ideological purity filter on all public discourse is a good thing are leav…
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Twitter is not dead; it rather caters to a different and broader audience segment now. What happened is that it is no longer an institutionally governed "safe space" where only leftist progressive views are allowed to be voiced in public, and any dissenting views were censored. The segment of people who think that applying that sort of leftist ideological purity filter on all public discourse is a good thing are leav…
I don't want to hear your ideology of how newly empowered bigots harassing folks off the platform is good, actually. Twitter used to be good and useful; removing actual verification, and then tweetdeck, and now you can't view threads without logging in, these things have made the site worse.
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Calling up Dang actually points out the one major weakness of this site from the outside. I don't know what his succession plan looks like, but if he gets hit by a bus, this site could change dramatically (for the worse) and almost immediately. When one person is your linchpin, you have one major, and guaranteed source of failures unless you take steps to mitigate. So it would be interesting to know what kind of succ…
I'm not the only moderator who knows how HN works. Just the only one who posts publicly these days.