Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#211

Post by ProllyInfamous » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

vintagedave wrote: post #210

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #207

Decades ago (1995), when I was barely a decade old , I created a maintainence/repair website for a Motorola product (pre-iFixit). A fellow geek created his own similar website, focusing more on general product usage. Neither of us webmasters took constructive feedback well , often lashing out at fellow usenet geeks who were just trying to be helpful . Tantrums, from us both. Twenty years later we randomly met in-pers…

I empathise. We definitely mature over time :) And we all have bad days. If we can bring the HN kind of interaction approach to more sites, we'll call ourselves successful. Dan and co provide an inspiration through this site. Someone commented below something about automating dan, and... dan, if you read this, I laughed, but kinda ;) At least, bringing a chance for or what we can of the general HN approach to other s…

>allowing people to build a score

I think of this as "letting their voice speak" — but yes, a "score"/tolerance of sorts.

>now is what should be reflected.

growth. context. rebirth. forgiveness.

It's always so shocking when decades-old writings discredit modern thinkers.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#212

Post by freedomben » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

tacitusarc wrote: post #132

vintagedave wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dave here -- I've tweaked a bunch of the internal rules during the HN discussion today, and your comment now passes (using the default settings.) As for equivocation, that should be strongly dialed down too. It annoyed me too, it was "mush", and did not help. I hope you'll find the current version a lot more human. I'm grateful for the feedback! Changing it based on all these comments has been intense over the past c…

Perhaps in keeping with age-old internet behaviors, it completely fails to recognize sarcasm.

As much as I love sarcasm that is done well, I do find that it translates very poorly to written text unless explicitly noted with /s or something like that. Even when annotated, it's extremely rare that a sarcastic comment actually furthers discussion or makes a meaningful point. If a person is using sarcasm, odds are pretty high that they aren't engaging substantively anyway. Given the difficulties with detection (which even many humans fail at) it seems like trying to detect sarcasm would just make the tool a lot less useful and would be mostly antithetical to the project goals anyway.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#213

Post by freedomben » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 6:13 PM UTC

edgyquant wrote: post #198

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cut off those using ad hominems. Fact check. All opinion should be labelled. Only one identity per person. Any associations or biases are public. Do all that then I can't see what's hard about it ;oP. Genuinely though, I think those things are doable. You probably have to have people use their own irl identities (at least the platform needs that information), which is problematic if you want free and open debate.

Fact checking is basically impossible as most things aren’t black and white and open to various interpretations. The idea of fact checkers online has been totally rejected because fact checkers themselves are vulnerable to bias and ideological capture.

Indeed. A few years ago I spent a lot of time "fact checking" things, and it's nearly impossible because there is way more speculation/interpretation of "facts" than most people think. Misleading headline writing makes this even worse because a lot of people don't read beyond the headline, or if they do they interpret the factual body of the article through a lens framed by the headline. The NY Times are exceptionally good at this. Read the article and it's factually correct, but different interpretations and the subtle insertion of opinions (often through headlines) . I'm not trying to shit on NYT here. NYT is still among the best sources, despite their imperfections. But it illustrates well the challenge.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#214

Post by freedomben » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 6:15 PM UTC

asddubs wrote: post #112

boznz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderating politics is not just hard, I would say its near impossible. I tend to hide anything that hints of politics from all my feeds, block users who are disrespectful, and reserve political banter for when I am walking with my friends, where we are all totally different on the spectrum, but remain civil.

I'm honestly not even sure if civil political discourse is desirable in times of radical actions being taken by the government. I almost think that's worse than no political discourse. e: To clarify my point, e.g. you can't calmly disagree with whether or not it's okay to shoot people in streets, that diminishes it as if it was just a slight disagreement

What's the point in discourse if not to change the other person's mind? Triggering the limbic system of the person you are talking to is the fastest way to ensure they won't be able to engage with their PFC and actually hear and consider what you're saying. If the point is just to feel better about how righteous and right you are, then by all means proceed with your approach. But if the point is to influence somebody's views, then you are self-defeating in your approach.

Personally, I think federal officers have executed law abiding citizens. But if I start out by screaming "The Nazis have control of our government and are executing innocent people in the streets!" then not only have I closed my own mind to potential challenges to my views (which is at best hypocritical to expect the other person to be open-minded when I am not myself open-minded), then we get nowhere and just come away hating each other and thinking the other person is crazy. Worse, it poisons the well so the future reasonable person is immediately written off with guilt-by-association (person A was crazy and person B shares a view with them, therefore they must be crazy too).

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#215

Post by Supermancho » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #98

Supermancho wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT, Respectify is trying to address improvements via leveraged grammar using minimal context. Dis/agreement is incidental. eg * Noun1 is great. * Noun2 is great. Ideally would result in equal outcomes.

Even for “ice cream” and “genocide” as the two nouns?

As I understand the purpose, yes.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#216

Post by ragall » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

edgyquant wrote: post #198

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cut off those using ad hominems. Fact check. All opinion should be labelled. Only one identity per person. Any associations or biases are public. Do all that then I can't see what's hard about it ;oP. Genuinely though, I think those things are doable. You probably have to have people use their own irl identities (at least the platform needs that information), which is problematic if you want free and open debate.

Fact checking is basically impossible as most things aren’t black and white and open to various interpretations. The idea of fact checkers online has been totally rejected because fact checkers themselves are vulnerable to bias and ideological capture.

It might not be possible to check every assertion, but in most cases it's possible.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#217

Post by ragall » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #214

asddubs wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly not even sure if civil political discourse is desirable in times of radical actions being taken by the government. I almost think that's worse than no political discourse. e: To clarify my point, e.g. you can't calmly disagree with whether or not it's okay to shoot people in streets, that diminishes it as if it was just a slight disagreement

What's the point in discourse if not to change the other person's mind? Triggering the limbic system of the person you are talking to is the fastest way to ensure they won't be able to engage with their PFC and actually hear and consider what you're saying. If the point is just to feel better about how righteous and right you are, then by all means proceed with your approach. But if the point is to influence somebody…

> What's the point in discourse if not to change the other person's mind?

That was a question made at one of those public debates that the Oxford University likes to organise, and I think the answer is right on point: the purpose of discourse is to let the audience (or readers) reflect on an opinion, which takes time. It's *almost never* to change the opinion of the person you're debating. It's a given that most people that do like to engage in debate or public discourse are the kind of people that are unlikely to change their minds, and if ever they do, it won't be on the spot.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#218

Post by freedomben » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

ragall wrote: post #217

freedomben wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point in discourse if not to change the other person's mind? Triggering the limbic system of the person you are talking to is the fastest way to ensure they won't be able to engage with their PFC and actually hear and consider what you're saying. If the point is just to feel better about how righteous and right you are, then by all means proceed with your approach. But if the point is to influence somebody…

> What's the point in discourse if not to change the other person's mind? That was a question made at one of those public debates that the Oxford University likes to organise, and I think the answer is right on point: the purpose of discourse is to let the audience (or readers) reflect on an opinion, which takes time. It's *almost never* to change the opinion of the person you're debating. It's a given that most peop…

Ah, yeah that's fair since we're talking about moderating online discussions which are accessible for the public. Although I think the principle still stands for people who aren't approaching the discussion from a principle of neutrality. The people in the audience that you want to change the minds of will react similarly to the way I described, so you might get a small percentage of open minded people but you limit your reach. The extremity of the position also tends to resonate poorly with moderates/undecideds, so I would still suspect that a more reasoned, logical argument would be more effective with the audience. That said though, you make an excellent point.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#219

Post by ragall » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

devin wrote: post #113

arjie wrote: post #73

I think the better model is to just block everyone who isn't useful to communicate with. For instance the top of this HN page reads (for me): 68 comments | 11 hidden | 3 blocked The hidden comments are from people in the Top 1000 by word count (who I usually don't want to hear from but if there is not much content I might click to toggle). The blocked are people I've seen argue with others in a useless way because th…

This goes back to my early days on the internet, but: I do not use blocklists or ignore features except as an absolute last resort. Ignoring the problem is not a solution. In other ways I think it just makes the problem worse. If the person is not banned from the community, then your decision to pretend they don't exist just leaves other people to deal with it. Instead my feeling is that you should confront it by lob…

> I do not use blocklists or ignore features except as an absolute last resort

I block people every single day. I've blocked so many people on Twitter that all I see is a very nice timeline with mostly stuff I like, some boring, but none of the culture wars garbage. Some days the timeline is completely empty, I suspect because Twitter can't cope with having blocked so many nodes in the social graph :D

> If the person is not banned from the community, then your decision to pretend they don't exist just leaves other people to deal with it.

When you start banning people outright from the entire community you risk ending up like any far left group, with schisms and civil wars between factions for absolutely tiny differences. The right approach is to have a very high bar for banning, and it's perfectly fine if people decide not to speak to one another.

Re: Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

#220

Post by vintagedave » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 7:35 PM UTC

ryanackley wrote: post #208

badc0ffee wrote: post #7

This thing seems to be more about enforcing a political PoV than about avoiding logical fallacies. All my attempts to comment on the UBI article (and not supporting UBI) said my comment was a dogwhistle, and/or had an overly negative tone. This topic, of all things, is absolutely worthy to challenge and debate. Using this would have the effect of creating an echo chamber, where people who stay never benefit from havi…

Yeah I feel like this will funnel everyone's opinion into sounding like it was written by an AI. Love the idea but the example they give with bears is absolutely hilarious. Calling bears dumb animals is offensive? God help us.

Hah, the idea is to have an example on the site that is not offensive -- we're not going to write something offensive down -- but where you can understand what it would be or could be. It lets you infer / understand the point without us actually writing something awful. (Maybe we can do it better, though.)

Bears seemed a pretty inoffensive target, plus our backend uses Python with beartype and that library is all about bear jokes.