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Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

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Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#121

Post by layer8 »

jdoliner wrote: post #116
roflyear wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think that HN lets dissenting opinions thrive (well, not anything that is truly controversial but not clearly hateful). That may feel cozy but it's not a reflection of anything pure or good, imo.

My experience is that HN's Overton window is probably on average 15-20% larger than most forums. That's not uniform across all topics though. So if you skew toward a particular set of topics it may feel like a typical forum, or even in some ways more constrained.

My feeling is it also depends on weekday vs. weekend, and on the time of day (or night).

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#123

Post by hnpolicestate »

incoming1211 wrote: post #63
roflyear wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think that HN lets dissenting opinions thrive (well, not anything that is truly controversial but not clearly hateful). That may feel cozy but it's not a reflection of anything pure or good, imo.

The problem is HN is mainly left leaning so its difficult to have discussion at times as dang and the community will shut it down quickly as differing opinions are not welcome even if its factual. (chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS nOt TrUe") (Love how HN proved my comment as correct)

It's not left leaning, it's establishment leaning. But that's only regarding politics and social issues.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#124

Post by nwgo »

theoryofx wrote: post #20

One thing that I appreciate about dang, and PG before him, is their intellectual honesty and strong sense of ethics. On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business. But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition, its been capable of unreasonable greatness and r…

[dead]

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#125

Post by dmix »

cbeach wrote: post #28

Welcome Tom! One thing I'd really like to see is less tactical flagging of content. Hopefully with your additional help, people who suppress content they disagree with will be kept in check. Open discourse is something that used to be sacrasanct in scientific and engineering circles. Over the last decade or so, free speech has been on the decline, and discussion is now very polarised along political lines. For exampl…

Some valid threads will get flagged because the comment section will be extremely predictable flame wars and have nothing to do with the article. That's the nature of social media. People can't help themselves. There's plenty of other social media sites for that sort of sports team drumbeating, so not much is lost by flagging some news article off the frontpage.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#126

Post by layer8 »

airstrike wrote: post #100
roflyear wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think that HN lets dissenting opinions thrive (well, not anything that is truly controversial but not clearly hateful). That may feel cozy but it's not a reflection of anything pure or good, imo.

On the one hand, I think it's a bit unfair that this comment is currently downvoted as it's discussing moderation on a topic about moderation, so very much on-topic in this particular submission. On the other hand, I think it needs to be more specific in order to be valuable feedback. Which dissenting opinions? Can you provide specific examples of comments you think got unreasonably flagged? There's been an uptick in…

My understanding is that flagging does not imply moderation. When enough people flag a comment, it becomes dead automatically. There is, separately, the case that a moderator “kills” an unacceptable comment, but then it only appears as [dead] I believe (unless it was also being flagged by people). Someone correct me if this is wrong.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#127

Post by pvg »

ryandrake wrote: post #67
cbeach wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flagging content should be a privilege that comes at a certain level of trust, and the privilege should be revoked by moderators for people that use flags to further an agenda. Trust in forum users can be measured by various metrics - The Discourse forum software is a good example of how to do this: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-t...

Since it's such a powerful action, it would be nice if flaggers had to at least justify the flag. Is it breaking a site rule? Is it spam? Is it not the original source? Does it actually violate the rules, or are you just using "Flag" as a mega-downvote for articles you don't personally like?

Yeah, that's the 'receipts for everything' idea and if you think it through, you'll realize it's at a minimum impractical and more likely just an outright bad idea. Where are these 'reasons' going to go? Who is going to read them or act on them? It sort of wants to stick it to those bad flaggers and misinformed downvoters or whatever but think about it applied to you. Do you not recoil at being asked by some random web app to justify your actions? Like, we're ostensibly here for conversation not to fill out TPS report cover sheets.

This is 'drink verification can' but for messageboards.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#128

Post by timeon »

eddyg wrote: post #43
bee_rider wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A political talking point can be nationally popular but still political, so, outside the scope of the site. Anyway, which nation? I think we also aren’t allowed to push Communist party talking points here, despite that party being highly supported in some countries (not that I’d want to, just saying, nationally popular doesn’t mean much).

A lot of people don't read the Hacker News Guidelines⁽¹⁾ before submitting and deserve to be flagged. Quoting (emphasis mine): Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. ⁽¹⁾ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguid…

> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon

Maybe time will tell if it was actually OT.

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