Tom what was your company in YC W09? And how did it go?
Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
281–290 of 498 posts
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#282Many thanks for the warm welcome, everyone. It’s been a privilege to help support this community and to work alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years. It’s a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving community, and I’m continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts thought and energy into it. One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected…
Welcome! And also I am so sorry
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#283Many thanks for the warm welcome, everyone. It’s been a privilege to help support this community and to work alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years. It’s a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving community, and I’m continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts thought and energy into it. One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected…
Thank you for doing what you do! I'm sure it isn't easy keeping this place healthy and thriving, but me and so many others really appreciate the blood, sweat and probably a few literal tears it takes :)
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess you could say the comment is conflating the mod team and the community. I think the community can be pretty susceptible to groupthink and hyper-conformity, and there are tons of legitimate criticisms around that. But it's true that usually the mod team won't suffer directly from that, from what I've seen.
One person’s “groupthink and hyper-conformity” is a statistician’s normal distribution.
The words I chose are specifically meant to highlight the downsides.
1. Groupthink has a negative connotation of the downsides baked in.
2. "Hyper" conformity (or hyper anything) is already saying that it is too much.
I think it's well known and appreciated that without diversity of thought and opinion, a group or organization makes possibly locally optimized, but poor decisions.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#285Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#286> He has been doing HN moderation work for years already and knows the site and its practices inside-out, so the only new thing you'll see is mod comments from Tom showing up in the threads the way mine do. I wonder if there are any other secret moderators.
There are many, I think? Dang has mentioned other moderators (plural) before, I believe.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#287Would it be possible to give him a new username for this role like “darn”?
Then we can continue confusing the beginnings of comments that appeal to authority as interjections.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
One person’s “groupthink and hyper-conformity” is a statistician’s normal distribution.
The words I chose are specifically meant to highlight the downsides. 1. Groupthink has a negative connotation of the downsides baked in. 2. "Hyper" conformity (or hyper anything) is already saying that it is too much. I think it's well known and appreciated that without diversity of thought and opinion, a group or organization makes possibly locally optimized, but poor decisions.
I know you were, and it’s troubling. You’re ascribing a sinister character to a literally normal phenomenon merely because you disagree with the outcome. And a normal distribution anticipates diversity within the sample: if there were no outliers, the distribution wouldn't look the way it does.
This kind of thinking led to the term “mainstream media” becoming a pejorative term, even though it fairly represented the majority viewpoint. In a well-informed society[1], one should expect the majority opinion to be the one closest to objective truth. (Consider the old “guess the number of jelly beans in the jar” experiment.)
[1] Yes, I am aware that this condition is doing some heavy lifting. :-)
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#289Dang, and Tom: I think it would be useful for you two moderators to use a "special" color, instead of the light gray that is used for any other username.
I believe the standard for annotating the utterance of deities is red text.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#290In the classic tradition of thinking that “dang” is pronounced “dang” and not “Dan G.” I propose that we read “tomhow” as “Tomh Ow”.
I think tom(a)how would work too.