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The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

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Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#131

Post by ksec »

stickfigure wrote: post #115
ksec wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I "think", most of those debate ties with technology one way or another. Say Joe Rogan's issue may not have been allowed on HN if it wasn't for Spotify. And more broadly speaking, what are the roles of technology in an extremely political sensitive climate. Should Telegram do A or B, and what about Whatsapp, Facebook moderation, Apple App Store disallow certain group, is that a curation problem or a political problem…

> I "think", most of those debate ties with technology one way or another. Nah. Yesterday's political topic (there's almost always at least one per day) was about the WWII Tokyo firebombing. I think the real answer is even simpler: I think dang (or whoever is on duty that day) asks themselves "is this topic going to lead to an interesting conversation, or will it devolve into a shitshow?" Shitshows generally get cann…

> was about the WWII Tokyo firebombing

My opinion is that as a topic belongs to "History" rather than politics. But I understand why people might disagree. I mean even my reply above is getting a lot of upvoted and downvoted at the moment.

But I do agree with the interesting conversation and shitshow being the simpler answer.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#132

Post by KerrAvon »

fallingknife wrote: post #93
optimalsolver wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said this before, but it's particularly notable how free speech Reddit alternatives very quickly end up taking a far-right tone. What's really funny is how all discussions they host have to be approached from that angle. So you can't just talk about your favorite TV show. You have to first make a nod to how it features a Jewish conspiracy to push black-white interracial relationships. Only then can you go on to…

This is because Reddit was the original free speech platform, and you could find anything from any or no political leaning. Then they dropped free speech and kicked off right leaning content. So of course the alternatives quickly go right. If they had kicked off left wing content all of the free speech sites would be left, and you couldn't talk about your favorite TV show without going into the relative representatio…

Pretty sure right-leaning content per se is still available on reddit and what's actually banned is outright Nazism, racism, violence, etc. Lefty content featuring coordinated politcal violence would also get banned, if it existed.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#133

Post by dekhn »

pvg wrote: post #128
dekhn wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent the last several years treating Hacker News as a machine learning source and have learned to understand upvotes (and downvotes). If you word things in a confrontationally, overly partisan, or ignorant way, you'll get downvoted, even by people who technically agree with you. So, go out of your way to write more neutrally to reduce downvotes on tone. If you propose an unpopular idea, or criticize one of HN's…

Be that as it may, you should still not post lame one-liners. That's still just obviously lame and you get sensibly scolded for it because it makes the site worse, orthogonal to unified theories of voting you may have developed.

Disagree. It's not particularly lame. A well written one-liner conveys more information and wastes less time. Maybe HN could have a "vetted user", somebody who generally plays by the rules of the site, so that people can see one-liners and know the person making them has the authority to say it.

Perfect example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30246830&p=2#30247139

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#134

Post by krapp »

tgv wrote: post #123
alphachloride wrote: post #12

> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative ... Reading this, I felt the description hit very close to home with regards to a substantive amount of discourse here. I also learned a new word!

It's very meta, because "performative erudition" could be the subtitle of The New Yorker.

They should know it when they see it.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#135

Post by vkk8 »

mindcrime wrote: post #42
bin_bash wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that's been here since the very beginning I think that tech has begun to be responsible for a larger portion of the world as a whole and this community has moved a small amount towards that direction as a result. I distinctly remember reading articles about major world events in the beginning as well so it's not entirely new, but it has grown a little. I don't think it's a problem, and this is coming from…

As someone that's been here since the very beginning I think that tech has begun to be responsible for a larger portion of the world as a whole and this community has moved a small amount towards that direction as a result. As one of the people who thinks that more (too much more) political content has crept in here, I will say that I agree with you on the above. That is, I agree that it is becoming harder (albeit no…

We tend to reserve the word "tech" for new technology especially. Cars, power tools and horse wagons were also new sexy technology once upon a time, but no-one calls companies making those products "tech companies". The categorization from "tech" to "normal stuff" happens when a technology becomes ubiquitous part of our society rather than play stuff of early adopters and hackers. Arguably this has recently happened also to social media, internet advertising and many other internet technologies so maybe we should move on and recategorize those things as what they are instead of "tech".

So what is "tech" now, if we take the definition to be "new technology not yet widely adopted by everyone's grandmother"? Maybe some of the blockchain stuff? Nuclear fusion? Reinforcement learning based AI agents? Self-driving cars? Hyperloop? Homomorphic encryption? Nerve implants? Robots capable of moving in unpredictable environments (like Boston Dynamics has)? Artificial meat? Space ships?

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#136

Post by grujicd »

awb wrote: post #6

Question for the mods: In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, 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. But I’ve seen more types of TV news s…

We come here not for the news, but for the comments. This kind of high quality community can't be found anywhere else, and that also applies to world/politics themes. Yes, you can read about that stuff elsewhere, but you won't find balanced views and rational arguments without ad hominem attacks. There are traces of that on HN too, but in vast majority of cases it's very civilized, opposed views are discussed and not downvoted to death. At least not as much as on other platforms.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#137

Post by BeFlatXIII »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28
awb wrote: post #6

Question for the mods: In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, 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. But I’ve seen more types of TV news s…

I don't mind the political discussions coming through as long as they don't dominate the front page. However, I am saddened with the diminishing engagement with actual hard tech stories (not tech opinion pieces) that reach the front page. Lately, it seems like links to stories about people doing cool software or hardware things with complete write-ups can barely muster enough upvotes to stay on the front page very lo…

IMO, it's because it's easy to understand and upvote non-tech stories compared to actual tech discussion. Even if you're a technical person, the article may be about a niche on the opposite side of the industry from where your knowledge lies, so you can't parse whether it's brilliant or nonsense. Non-tech stories are typically much easier to form opinions over, for better and worse.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#138

Post by psahgal »

I'd just like to say "thank you" to the moderators for helping make Hacker News such an interesting site. I've been reading Hacker News for years and it's really helped me keep on top of emerging trends in technology! Sometimes I've seen tech news hit Hacker News before even the major news outlets have a chance to report. It's pretty impressive. Keep up the good work!

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#139

Post by pvg »

dekhn wrote: post #133
pvg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be that as it may, you should still not post lame one-liners. That's still just obviously lame and you get sensibly scolded for it because it makes the site worse, orthogonal to unified theories of voting you may have developed.

Disagree. It's not particularly lame. A well written one-liner conveys more information and wastes less time. Maybe HN could have a "vetted user", somebody who generally plays by the rules of the site, so that people can see one-liners and know the person making them has the authority to say it. Perfect example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30246830&p=2#30247139

It's totally lame and the example is, indeed, perfectly lame. But there's a trivial way to make these good which, if you look at dang-scoldings of lame one liners, works surprisingly well for a huge number of them, not just yours:

Write the one liner and then imagine you got a moderator scolding. Then write a comment defending your one liner from the charge of 'unsubstantiveness'. Finally, delete the one liner and post the defense.

I bet you'd almost never get scolded for these and the upvotes would be even bigger.

Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

#140

Post by bnralt »

k__ wrote: post #87
bnralt wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't say this has been my experience. Many of the places I've found with the best discussions have had little to no moderation. The old IMDB boards, for example, were almost entirely devoid of moderation, but had some of the best and most informative discussions about movies and TV shows. There are a number of niche forums I frequent that are similar. I've even seen a number of subreddits with no moderators/inactive…

There are some hidden gems, that's right. But I had the impression that you habe to ignore a swath of racism, sexism, homo/transphobia, and conspiracy theory to find them.

Personally, I've found that I've had to avoid hate and misinformation just about anywhere I go on the internet. I think there's a tendency for people to get used to the hate and misinformation that's acceptable for their in-group and become blind to it, thinking that their corner of the internet is devoid of it.

For instance, many posts here about geopolitics appear to me as xenophobic and full of false information (particularly when they're countries that I'm familiar with). But it's hard for people to see that, or even think anyone could legitimately feel that way, when it's considered by the in-group to simply be "common sense." Heavy handed moderation about a subject (rather than simple topicality like with Hacker News) can lead to the entrenchment of these in-groups, which can both increases the level of these comments and leads people to think of them as nothing more than common discourse. It also increases bifurcation, so you have competing "destroy all Pepsi" and "destroy all Coke" forums, both of whom think they're merely bring moderate common sense ideas forward to oppose the extremists on the other end.

Having said that, the forums I'm talking about seem to have a lower level of this in general, since they often focus on a particular niche. Similar to how the rules against political discussion let's Hacker News have better discussions than in general, but when political discussions do slip through then tend to be closer to typical internet discussions.

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