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Post by dang » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 5:39 AM UTC

throwaway665544 wrote: post #436

dang wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Transparent" means different things to people, but if you mean a full moderation log: I think most likely it would produce more questions and effort, for no clear gain. I've written about this over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Here's how I look at it: if trust is present, then we don't need to publish a full log, as long as we answer questions when people ask them. That…

Envision an airline withholding safety records, a car manufacturer keeping crash test results private, a restaurant refusing to provide health inspection logs, or a government refusing to disclose details of its budget allocation — all claiming that transparency would only complicate matters and provide "more data for distrust". In each case, the flawed nature of your core argument becomes obviously evident. I fully…

Post by JimDabell » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 5:41 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #296

MichaelZuo wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be some way of doing language detection to detect the relative quality of 'flaming' going on. So the highest quality 'flame wars' can remain untouched, but downranking everything else below that bar probably makes sense.

Yes, the carrot of automation would be so much easier than the stick of manual review. I haven't seen any system that works well enough yet though. The nice thing is that the comments are all public so if someone wants to take a crack at building a state-of-the-art sentiment detector or what have you, they can have a go—and if anyone comes up with anything serious, we'd certainly like to see it. As would the entire c…

Post by fragmede » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 5:45 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #296

MichaelZuo wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be some way of doing language detection to detect the relative quality of 'flaming' going on. So the highest quality 'flame wars' can remain untouched, but downranking everything else below that bar probably makes sense.

Yes, the carrot of automation would be so much easier than the stick of manual review. I haven't seen any system that works well enough yet though. The nice thing is that the comments are all public so if someone wants to take a crack at building a state-of-the-art sentiment detector or what have you, they can have a go—and if anyone comes up with anything serious, we'd certainly like to see it. As would the entire c…

Post by dang » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 5:50 AM UTC

JimDabell wrote: post #443

dang wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the carrot of automation would be so much easier than the stick of manual review. I haven't seen any system that works well enough yet though. The nice thing is that the comments are all public so if someone wants to take a crack at building a state-of-the-art sentiment detector or what have you, they can have a go—and if anyone comes up with anything serious, we'd certainly like to see it. As would the entire c…

You don’t really need a state-of-the-art anything here. People get too distracted with building the perfect system when it comes to use cases like this because they are paralysed thinking about the avoidance of false positives and make a bunch of sub-optimal decisions on that basis. False positives are much less of a problem with a human in the loop, and putting a human in the loop doesn’t require moderator effort. Y…

Post by elpocko » Sat, Feb 03, 2024, 6:04 AM UTC

nkurz wrote: post #438

elpocko wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to make accusations or invent "shadowy figures". HN has a very small number of moderators and their actions are not transparent, that's all.

Thanks for clarifying. I think part of my confusion was that HN only has one moderator at this point. Also, I'd probably say "not always obvious" rather than "not transparent". While there is no public record of moderation, at least for me Dan has been excellent about answering questions when asked.