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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)

#161

Post by bxk1 »

telltruth wrote: post #155

I really appreciate @dang for such an attentive hard work. He definitely deserves kudos. But here's the rub. You will not see this post. I have been secretely ghosted out so all my comments goes to bottom no matter how thoughful or informative it may be. There is no way for me to de-ghosted. He or other mod probably did this to me for some reason I don't even know or remember. The moderation at HN is like life senten…

They basically do account downweighting for people they don't like. Just make a new account with clean cookies and if you are using the same IP check your comment visibility from other IPs from time to time, as they record which accounts were on which IP and might invent some other bullshit measure against you in the future as more people become aware of the downweighting.

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

#162

Post by dang »

Moru wrote: post #147
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's also the 'delay' setting that you can set in your HN user profile, which gives you 1-10 minutes to edit your comment before it becomes visible to others. This has saved my bacon on many occasions.

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

#163

Post by caf »

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 the mathematical term "complement" might be more in line with the intended meaning.

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

#164

Post by atum47 »

Well, when I got my first meaningful job as a software engineer I made sure to come here and thank the awesome people of HN - I usually talk to Dang, but I'm sure everyone is nice.

I have vanished from several places like twitter, reddit, linkedin... HN is the place I come daily to read the news and often share my personal projects.

Thanks Dang - and everyone else - I sure appreciate you.

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

#165

Post by chillacy »

CalChris wrote: post #14

As someone who has been dinged by dang, I appreciate moderation.

I recall receiving a nudge from dang to be more charitable years ago. I'd like to think it set me in a better direction since. A small change in slope leads to a big change in y-intercept down the line, to use a math analogy.

I've grown to really appreciate his style of active moderation.

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

#166

Post by skinnymuch »

Vaslo wrote: post #68

I’ve put up a bunch of stories, most get no traction. However on the weekend once in a while I get a message from HN that one of my stories is pretty interesting and I should repost it. While every other service relies completely on some algorithm, it’s good to see a place like HN where people are jumping in and trying to stabilize things.

Wow interesting. I didn’t know that happens. Who contacts you and how?

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

#167

Post by grawprog »

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.

I'm going to throw one out for dang here. I took your moderating personally when I first joined here, got banned for some comments I didn't think were that bad, hell i've made worse since, spent a while posting greyed out comments going off at dang, posted some not so shitty comments that got given a chance, realized I should try harder in my comments and just push my way back in by writing things that contribute better to HN.

It would have been easy to start a new account, but I liked warring with dang at the time. I even emailed him a bunch appealing my, what I still believe is not really all that bad of a comment, but I accept why it got me in shit as a newer commenter. It spurred me to just try harder at contributing better.

Eventually, I was just randomly unbanned. Since then, i've come appreciate HN's moderation style.

There's really not many places on the internet with such lax account rules, yet mostly good conversation.

I appreciate the surprisingly wide range of topics and viewpoints generally allowed here. It does get a bit echo chambery, but mostly, any issue tends to get both sides heard as long as comments are written constructively.

Also, just learning about the purpose of this site helped. This is a news website, first and foremost, for people interested in funding from YC. It may have expanded since then, but the moderation does reflect the intended purpose of this site and just generally the kind of discourse expected from people interested in YC funding or other such things.

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

#170

Post by krapp »

throwaway4220 wrote: post #64

This place is amazing, and I learned so much about a variety of topics. Most of my MD colleagues use Twitter or Facebook, where the signal-to-noise is much, much lower. I assume there have been plenty of spin-offs from HN (I would LOVE to have a similar forum for discussing medical issues; Can I fork the codebase somehow?), but I do think the secret sauce is moderation. Also, politically, I'm "an enlightened centrist…

dang has already mentioned the original Arc forum but I'd be remiss not to mention Anarki[0], the public fork. It's diverged quite a bit from Hacker News though so don't expect feature parity.

[0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

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