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Swift invisible action when facing bad faith actors; sporadic public call outs for quick attitude correction; and consistent helpful presence like multi-page reminders and clarifications on the inner workings of this forum.
I find your style of moderation to be the golden standard on how to foster a healthy online community.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve also seen him be accused of biases involving his supposedly being Chinese. It’s sad when anything on HN turns into a flame war, and it would happen a lot more without his constant intervention.
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I agree that he does very fine work here.
As someone who has been dinged by dang, I appreciate moderation.
Unfortunately the site doesn't let me read the post until I login or disable 'my adblocker', which I don't have enabled.
One thing I've always wondered, is whether moderating a forum like HN (or any forum, really) is mentally stimulating enough to do day in and day out. As a web developer, the more I do the more I crave novel challenges. Writing CRUD apps or getters and setters gets old fast. Are there novel challenges with content moderation?
Did dang promote this to the front page? :) Seriously tho... shout out to dang for all the hard work he does. (Please don't vote me up if you agree - I don't want the karma - just comment instead...)
Upvotes are not just for karma, they also show that you say relevant/important things and that people agree with you.
In that context, HN consensus on downvoting jokes makes more sense. I like a good joke, but they belong on the bottom of the page after the "serious" conversation. It's unfortunate that it's overloaded with karma, but complicating the upvote/downvote system has other drawbacks.
One thing I've always wondered, is whether moderating a forum like HN (or any forum, really) is mentally stimulating enough to do day in and day out. As a web developer, the more I do the more I crave novel challenges. Writing CRUD apps or getters and setters gets old fast. Are there novel challenges with content moderation?
I can't say for HN, but the general answer is yes. Social systems tend to produce a lot of novel behavior, with plenty of surprising second- and third-order effects. Dealing with jerks, trolls, griefers, etc, is an arms race; they're always looking for new ways to mess things up. And the tools in this space are constantly evolving, too; for example, there's a lot of interesting ML work being done for automated conten…
Thanks for everything!