Thanks for being a crucial part of this crucial part of my life, Tom.
Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
321–330 of 498 posts
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. People will frequently say that downvoting is not for disagreeing, but in every controversial thread dissenting opinions are quickly downvoted and frequently flagged. Some recover, but many die or end up pushed down into obscurity. Mildly controversial opinions sometimes survive and get discussion, but anything past that rarely get a reply and just get downvoted and flagged into oblivion. This isn't exact…
Downvoting for disagreement has always been fine on HN. People sometimes assume otherwise because they're implicitly porting the rules from a larger site, but that's a mistake. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
It has but I'm not sure this works at the scale HN operates at now. When the community was smaller, the band of opinion was narrower, so the downvote worked better. Now that the community is large I'm not sure if this scales well. Just a thought I've had over the last few years.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#323Many 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…
Tom, what a small world. Seems just like yesterday we were at Inspire 9 together!
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
He died, I'm fine with making an exception for it.
Why? He isn't relevant to HN at all. Is every celebrity death newsworthy on HN now?
Maybe he was significant to a lot of hackers. The death was also untimely, which reminds us to cherish the time we have. Many of us are in our 50s or 60s.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#325> 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.
If you reach 160'000 karma you can see the secret mods
was really hoping the threshold is 65,535 because I'm much more likely to reach it counting backwards.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#326> 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.
We're all secret moderators except you.
This would have been an epic April 1st joke :)
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#327Would 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.
Yes, and then the next two mods could be "heck" and "gosh"! Maybe "dadgummit" if the powers-that-be are feeling spicy. :-)
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many people feel that flagging is worse than it used to be, but they don't agree at all on what should or shouldn't be flagged. That makes this feedback less actionable than one might assume. HN gets tons and tons of threads that are critical of LLMs, so it's possible that the ones you're seeing get flagged are just below median quality and/or overly repetitive of previous discussions.
Hey, Dan. I'd be really interested if you could share more about the metrics. As the climate of the world around us has changed, I think a lot of us at least feel flagging has become a cudgel used to silence opposition. Me, for criticism of the current administration. Others, for their views on topics like gender. Maybe we just care more and notice it about that subject now. Maybe it's always been this way. But while…
Dan and Tom can speak to this, but by my reading of the guidelines, "criticism of the current administration" and "views on topics like gender" are both explicitly prohibited:
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
It has nothing to do with being on the side of "the opposition" or "the man," it's because those sorts of posts inevitably lead to the same, repetitive, off-topic debates and flame wars.
Flagging should be used as a cudgel against posts that break the rules. There are plenty of places on the internet to debate politics and gender; HN is not one of them.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button. That's a valid use of the button by design, HN is literally made to allow for that use. Plus it mimics real life interactions - there is a social cost/friction to saying things people disagree with or think are outright wrong. Most online chitchat places deteriorate because they remove such social frictions.
I would say it mimics real life interactions of some communities. I do not think that is universal. I tend to think that the communities, in real life and online, that permit civil discussion of dissenting opinions are the healthier ones. I think there is a far greater real life social cost in violating standards of behaviour, such as aggressive engagement, or acting without empathy. I would argue that it is those in…
I would say it mimics real life interactions of some communities. I do not think that is universal.
I would say this is straight up wrong. It is universal since it's fundamental to being a social animal. There's a cost to being at odds with a group. We do have all sorts of mechanism and rituals, formal and informal, to minimize or amortize that cost in all sorts of settings but it's still there and it's still essential. You look at the faces of your coworkers in a meeting in which you're making some unpopular proposal to see how it's going over and you feel the slight sting of recognizing the smallest hints of disapproval. It's built right into all human interaction.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#330The question is, who among is willing to be the object of tomhow's first official Unsportsmanlike Conduct penalty? ;)