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Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

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Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#151

Post by sokoloff »

ryandrake wrote: post #150
dang wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's understandable that that moderation practice is kind of obscure and can be annoying. I wrote an explanation of it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27132402 . I looked for posts that match your description and found these three: It looks like we detached https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058506 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058435 because it was offtopic - and probably also sever…

Wow, thanks for taking the time to make that massive reply. This kind of Inside Baseball is facinating and really helps to take the mystery out of what goes on here. Surprised that this "tree balancing" really makes much of a difference. EDIT: I wonder if trolls deliberately wait for and then target top main-threads, in order to maximize the blast radius of their trolling.

It’s amusing to me that this submission (from pg’s 2-year-old tweet) serves to make more work for dang on a Saturday.

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#152

Post by krapp »

dahart wrote: post #34
samizdis wrote: post #5

I'd like to think that more than a few people grasp this. He's some kind of machine - in the best, complimentary way. His replies to emails are succinct, helpful, educational, and still personable. No idea how he retains his equanimity across hundreds/thousands of interactions, mostly with strangers. IMO it's a worthwhile lesson (and a free one) to peruse his comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=d…

I honestly wonder sometimes how it’s physically possible to do what dang does, it seems like such an enormous and Sisyphean task. Sad to see twitter replies complaining about the moderation, because if it wasn’t for the moderation the quality here would be much lower, the moderation is the whole reason those people are attracted to participating here. Respect and many thanks indeed.

I wonder if this is a sign that they need more moderators. Given how much moderation is done by the community, I'm surprised dang needs to work as hard as he seems to.

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#153

Post by pvg »

ryandrake wrote: post #150
dang wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's understandable that that moderation practice is kind of obscure and can be annoying. I wrote an explanation of it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27132402 . I looked for posts that match your description and found these three: It looks like we detached https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058506 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058435 because it was offtopic - and probably also sever…

Wow, thanks for taking the time to make that massive reply. This kind of Inside Baseball is facinating and really helps to take the mystery out of what goes on here. Surprised that this "tree balancing" really makes much of a difference. EDIT: I wonder if trolls deliberately wait for and then target top main-threads, in order to maximize the blast radius of their trolling.

Lots of people do this without necessarily being trolls because they feel their comment would be lost, especially if some giant topcomment is dominating the discussion.

People also do the opposite - writing a toplevel comment to discuss (berate, more often than not) multiple other comments - 'I can't believe the nattering nabobs of negativism that have been commenting here, etc'.

In both cases, writing a good, non-repetitive, non-meta toplevel comment is probably better but it's more work and potentially unsatisfying - a lot of the time, a comment like that will in fact be lost in a big discussion.

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#154

Post by yesenadam »

TameAntelope wrote: post #149
lolinder wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally, he tends to favor the original aggressor, ignoring the concept of instigation to fix the proximate cause of the negative interactions here. Don’t get caught punching second, in other words. Can you give an example? I just went through dang's comments in the last few days and found nothing of the sort, and it has not been my experience at all, unless posting an unpopular opinion counts as instigation.…

Look at his post history, you can see plenty of examples. A pattern he follows very commonly is seen here [0]: "Can you stop doing $thing?" However, it's dang's opinion that $thing is occurring, and he makes zero effort to understand why $thing could even be happening, and further entertains zero challenges to his interpretation of what has taken place. It's, "stop doing $thing, which is definitely happening, or else…

Your complaints are totally unreasonable and sound ridiculous to me. "dang's intervention is often the most toxic behavior in a comment chain" is laughable. If you look more into dang's comment history, he has often explained at length about the kind of issues you link to. Often his comments link to a whole lot of previous long explanations. I've spent hours down those rabbit holes, and it's the most impressive, insightful writing I've seen in my years on HN.

I was 'danged' once, after I angrily responded to someone who made an outrageous comment to me, attacking me strongly for saying cheating was bad. Dang objected to my comment. I said, what the other guy said was much worse! Dang hadn't even read the other guy's comment, which seemed so unfair.

He explained to me that it doesn't matter what the other guy said. "Punching second" or in any order, is not ok on here. Read the comment guidelines. He said that being on HN is a continual exercise is not being triggered, in not commenting while angry. They were wise words which I think greatly improved my HN comments, or at least I don't do those triggered, snarky, cutting responses any more, or almost never. No matter what the other guy said. Silence is often the best response, or the only good one. That someone else is being an asshole on here is no reason to join them.

You are apparently fairly new here, and seem to have little idea of the massive number of comments written on HN each day. I looked at the first couple of pages of your recent comments, and most of them have a very unpleasant, hostile tone. You are in no position to criticize dang. Read the "In comments" section of the guidelines, the part starting "Be kind. Don't be snarky." A lot of your comments break them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#155

Post by yesenadam »

Arnt wrote: post #48
water8 wrote: post #44

Well if he’s busy banning people for political ideologies when in reality he’s running a message board with the technology from 1995

Try harder. HN uses a lisp, which is a programming language family from the sixties. Can it possibly be any more obsolete — according to the test you prefer? Something has to be very wrong with HN. Unless the problem is that the test is bonkers.

1950s!

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#156

Post by beachy »

dang wrote: post #147
beachy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a pub we used to go to occasionally in Berkshire. When one of the crusty old locals went to the bar, they were always served first, even if other customers had already been waiting a while. Great for them, but made for an unwelcoming vibe that definitely reduced their custom. We only put up with it because they had a great garden area for kids.

That last bit reminds me of Orwell's description of his ideal pub, the "Moon Under Water": The great surprise of the Moon Under Water is its garden. You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are little green tables with iron chairs round them. Up at one end of the garden there are swings and a chute for the children. On su…

That does sound ideal all right.

Another feature of that pub I remember was a setup where patrons could dress up in Velcro vests, then jump onto a big trampoline and hurl themselves up as high as possible onto a Velcro wall where they stuck like flies. Fun times, if not Orwellian.

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#157

Post by TameAntelope »

yesenadam wrote: post #154
TameAntelope wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at his post history, you can see plenty of examples. A pattern he follows very commonly is seen here [0]: "Can you stop doing $thing?" However, it's dang's opinion that $thing is occurring, and he makes zero effort to understand why $thing could even be happening, and further entertains zero challenges to his interpretation of what has taken place. It's, "stop doing $thing, which is definitely happening, or else…

Your complaints are totally unreasonable and sound ridiculous to me. "dang's intervention is often the most toxic behavior in a comment chain" is laughable. If you look more into dang's comment history, he has often explained at length about the kind of issues you link to. Often his comments link to a whole lot of previous long explanations. I've spent hours down those rabbit holes, and it's the most impressive, insi…

Haha, your comment is exactly the comment I'd expect to get moderated, but won't because it's long and dang won't read it (and he is spread too thin).

Any comment citing "newguidelines.html" should probably get flagged for review, for example.

I also am not new here, but imagine why I might seem to be...

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#159

Post by fuzzfactor »

mephitix wrote: post #131

He should write a book on moderating online communities. Not joking, we are trying to build a large online community now and I would love to pick his brain on balancing incentives, encouraging curiosity, having equanimity, and all kinds of aspects in “practical sociology”. I think his in-the-trenches experience would benefit many people trying to build and maintain healthy online communities. Thanks dang!!

When someone has developed a remarkable approach that could be considered almost like the textbook guidelines that others could learn from, that's when someone else with meaningful subject interest needs to follow them around with a clipboard until there's enough juicy content for a book, and edit it for publication together.

More likely to disseminate best practices much sooner than waiting for a mission-critical operator to have time to write it themselves.

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