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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

#231

Post by ZeWaka »

bell-cot wrote: post #186
jdoliner wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business. I think it's at least as plausible that this is part of the magic that makes it good. HN is sufficiently "on the margin" that they don't have to do things like placate advertisers with their moderation policies. The mods like dang, tomhow and pg mostly care about HN as users rather than owners. > It woul…

Before even the "has a mission of its own" part, an independent non-profit needs to pay its bills. I suspect that dang & Co. aren't working for free. Similar for servers & internet connections & etc. And I'd bet that few people here want to see ads, or start paying for their accounts.

I imagine 90% of users here would just block any ads anyways.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#232

Post by bee_rider »

nubinetwork wrote: post #89
eddyg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You say that, but there was a big thread on Val Kilmer on the front page this morning...

This is not really mysterious or anything, though, right? They allow bending of the rules for stuff that is not likely to devolve into a big stupid political flame war, because, like, pick your battles.

Also I’d expect there to be some annoying edge cases if they tried to ban that sort of discussion. I mean, Kilmer is not a tech person. But tech people die sometimes too. Arguably discussing their life as people is outside the scope of the site. Maybe we shouldn’t have had a conversation about how great a guy Mr. Moolenaar was and just discussed the technical aspects of his life’s work. But, come on, that’d not really be a human way of responding to somebody’s death, right?

If we’re going to have these sort of lightly rule breaking threads, then I don’t think it is necessary to ask the mods to adjudicate exactly who’s technical enough to warrant one. It’s a fuzzy spectrum anyway, we have tech people, tech policy people, STEM outreach people, tech YouTube influencers, celebrities that played beloved nerd characters.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#235

Post by layer8 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #200
layer8 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I see. I understood “moderation policies” upthread to refer to what guides the actions of the moderators.

Fair enough, I can see from the thread how that interpretation could arise. I would definitely interpret "moderation policy " to be policy implemented by moderators. In this case, I was responding to the statement that "flagging is not moderation", and I thought it was useful to distinguish that flagging semantically is a kind of moderation (done by users rather than by moderators).

For me the difference is that moderation by moderators is (usually) guided by some content policy, and one can disagree about the biases of the specific content policy, or disagree about applying a content policy based on topics and themes at all (as opposed to based on mere style and civility). With user actions, there is no predefined content policy, it’s just how the set of users who happen to read the specific thread or comment happen to feel.

Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading. But I also think that active moderation and crowd-sourced ranking mechanics are two different things.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#238

Post by JoshTriplett »

layer8 wrote: post #235
JoshTriplett wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, I can see from the thread how that interpretation could arise. I would definitely interpret "moderation policy " to be policy implemented by moderators. In this case, I was responding to the statement that "flagging is not moderation", and I thought it was useful to distinguish that flagging semantically is a kind of moderation (done by users rather than by moderators).

For me the difference is that moderation by moderators is (usually) guided by some content policy, and one can disagree about the biases of the specific content policy, or disagree about applying a content policy based on topics and themes at all (as opposed to based on mere style and civility). With user actions, there is no predefined content policy, it’s just how the set of users who happen to read the specific th…

> Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading.

I think that's a very different kind of forum, and it needs different tools to be usable, and it more quickly fails into unusability.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#239

Post by layer8 »

ttepasse wrote: post #226
layer8 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The value of "enough" is a moderation decision made by a human.

It’s not a decision made per individual submission or comment, I think. Of course, the specific automated mechanism exists because some human decided to implement it. My point is, in the case of the flagging mechanism, it’s not the moderators who are deciding based on the contents of the submission or comment.
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