The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

Post by jq-r » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

glup wrote: post #83

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…

This sort of reminds me of what happened to the Slashdot... everyone was playing video games, hacking with Arduinos, doing silly things with homelabs, arguing about OS X vs. Linux, etc. and then suddenly so many people in the community moved up through the ranks and started to interface with politics, policy, and international business, just as those things started to really change with tech. So ya, tech overflows it…

Post by dang » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

lgregg wrote: post #129

dang wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a few hours a while back writing up a reusable answer for this question, with lots of links from years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 . The short answer is that not much has changed, including the perceptions of change (e.g. "HN is becoming 2005 Slashdot" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 - August 2013.) If anyone wants to understand our thinking about political topics on HN,…

how do you manage all these replies? is it just bookmarked or do you keep a spreadsheet? I see you do this often.

Post by matsemann » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

optimalsolver wrote: post #4

I've noticed that all the online spaces I enjoy visiting are heavily moderated. Whenever I get linked to "free speech" loosely-moderated platforms, I usually hit the back button pretty quick.

Post by bitwize » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:11 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #99

shadowgovt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy. History (particularly twentieth-century history) is caked in the blood of people killed by technologies that were originally conceived of by people pursuing what they thought was innocent (or…

I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy. I don't disagree. And if somebody started a forum dedicated to "the social implications of technology" I'd probably join and participate (some). But TBH, when I come to HN, I'm more intereste…

Post by mindcrime » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:17 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #147

mindcrime wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy. I don't disagree. And if somebody started a forum dedicated to "the social implications of technology" I'd probably join and participate (some). But TBH, when I come to HN, I'm more intereste…

Everybody who still thinks real-world moral and, hence, political concerns are somehow separable from hacker interests needs to see Allison Parrish's "Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic" talk (or read the transcript) before posting: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...