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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)

#141

Post by cambalache »

Razengan wrote: post #82

When I first discovered HN, it was like a breath of fresh air compared to Reddit etc. I have since lost faith. HN likes to masquerade as some sort of upscale establishment, high and above the petty squabbles of Eslewhere, but in the end this place too devolves into a predictable echo chamber just like the rest of them, when it comes to any topic on which people have varied opinions. This is not a place for dissenting…

Reddit is like an average high school, full of dumb kids, who dont take anything seriously and who put a facade of competence to hide their lack of experience.

HN is like an Ivy League freshman class. Most of the kids are smart, opinionated and sure they will rule the world some day.Many have some pretty nice accomplishments. But you scratch below the surface and you will notice they are also just a bunch of kids: insecure,especially about their intelligence,they take themselves way too seriously, love one-up each other and beyond their close area of knowledge they have painfully naive//cliche views.

Dont take this site too seriously, especially since in the last 2-3 years it has been infested with "guerilla marketers"

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

#142

Post by chris_wot »

Raphmedia wrote: post #85

I've been confronted by Dang a long while ago in an account I lost the access to since. I was hurt, but it was also a very educative experience. Most of my life has been spent moderating online communities. Needless to say why, I am trying to mimic the style of moderation I have been on the receiving end of. Keep up the good work!

I got told repeatedly that I "knew why" I was rate limited, but never given an actual explanation. Then it was lifted. Go figure.

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

#143

Post by dwd »

dang wrote: post #130
part1of2 wrote: post #128

> site’s anti-abuse systems, many of which Bell and Gackle have written themselves. That sounds interesting! How were these built? In the same Arc language? Any chance this can be open sourced?

In Arc, yes. Unfortunately not, because we don't know how to write anti-abuse systems that keep working once people know what they are.

Unfortunate but very true; it's always interesting to see what other people have in their bag of tricks - but a magician should never tell.

I would guess that you have rules based on patterns of observed behaviour, and that they do 80-90% of the effective blocking.

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

#146

Post by mayank »

echelon wrote: post #32

Thanks dang! You've helped keep HN readable, corrected countless title and link errors, and prevented heated discussions from devolving into fights. I also am super thankful for your help getting my "Show HN" post to the front page. We all appreciate you.

TIL it's "Dan G" and not the Chinese surname "Dang" that I'd always assumed.

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

#147

Post by Moru »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #110
TulliusCicero wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dang banned me for making a snarky, snipey comment about someone else's moral compass, and he was correct to do so. He also let me back in after I apologized via email, which I appreciate.

While I have never been banned, I have been warned several times by dang about my behavior and I deserved every one of them. It seems to have worked too, because a lot of times I'll write a nasty comment and there will be this little voice in my head asking "what's dang going to think of this?" and I'll either edit it, not post it, or delete it.

When I feel a bit to much about a subject I open notepad and write the comment there and then just close the window if it feels inappropriate. This way there is no risk that I accidentally post it but it still feels like I got to say what I wanted to say. And then I can write something more levelheaded.

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

#148

Post by mikewarot »

I find that NH is a great jumping off point for adventures I didn't even know I wanted to take. For instance, in this story I learned that some people can down-vote, and a lot of work is done in the background to keep goofballs like me from derailing things.

I too would like to thank the moderators.

Further, and more interestingly to me, I learn that HN is written in a LISP variant called ARC... I've never understood LISP, and especially never thought that anything useful could be built with it... at least at the subconscious level, yet I know AutoCad and Emacs are built around it. I have similar feelings about Prolog, which I tried once and just didn't grok.

Is there an IDE for lisp?

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

#149

Post by egypturnash »

ducttapecrown wrote: post #132
chrisweekly wrote: post #105

> "[dang] later told me that he sees frustration at work as part of the DNA of Hacker News. “The instinct that there simply has to be a better way to build systems, and the yearning to connect with it,” he said. “If you can’t do that at your job, and few can, then you can at least dream and read and argue about it on the Internet. Hacker News is the inverse image of many people’s jobs, overlaid on top of each other—a…

The phrase inverse image means something specific in mathematics, so I'm getting confused trying to connect that meaning with dang's quote—like, what is the function?

I think "photo-negative" might be another analogy for this that does not trigger attempts to search for this meaning.

So might "boolean NOT", to maybe be a bit more programmerly.

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

#150

Post by DoreenMichele »

rectang wrote: post #117
mdpm wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on not creating silos. Adding User 'flair' is perhaps a viable option, where users can simply tag other users with a short description. That enables both properties - avoiding discourse you find troubling, and allowing users to highlight those that they find enlightening. Freedom of speech works well when paired with freedom to listen. Removing content (even if only from a user's view) only deepens the filter…

> Agreed on not creating silos. There's one big silo, with the people who have stayed within it, and the people who have left outside it. There aren't very many women here, which I assume is because of how the HN conversations about issues important to women tend to play out. This isn't an HN-specific problem, it's industry-wide. But I didn't go into software until my 30s, so the gender skew of the industry feels ali…

There aren't very many women here

There is a great deal more female participation than there used to be. It's just not obvious for various reasons, but it's something I have paid attention to over the years and used to keep private data on to some degree.

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