The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019) • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by pydry » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:04 PM UTC

Sebb767 wrote: post #112

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind the political discussions coming through as long as they don't dominate the front page. However, I am saddened with the diminishing engagement with actual hard tech stories (not tech opinion pieces) that reach the front page. Lately, it seems like links to stories about people doing cool software or hardware things with complete write-ups can barely muster enough upvotes to stay on the front page very lo…

You can use the classic frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic It uses the same algorithm, but only counts upvotes from accounts created before 2012 (iirc). EDIT: I was slightly off, the deadline is 2008: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...

I was expecting that to be markedly different from the current front page but it looks very similar to me.

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

#202

Post by pasadenasunset » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

edgyquant wrote: post #165

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are easy to avoid howerver. Not participating in them and upvoting other contents solve the issue at least for yourself.

Incorrect. This is what we were told about Reddit as we watched it become basically unusable as a platform. Voting alone isn’t a proper way to guarantee quality discussion (the opposite actually.)

True, but whatever mechanism takes its place must contend with the fact that users vary in the extent they: 1) actively think of the larger community vs. themselves as a member; and 2) derive individual esteem from it.

As an example, the karma system at Reddit looks fine on paper relative to #1, but #2 is what created the phenomenon of meandering threads full of single phrase bad puns. The users are converging on a local maximum gain of esteem via upvotes, per unit of effort as measured by post length.

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

#203

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:09 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #124

awb wrote: post #6

Question for the mods: In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. But I’ve seen more types of TV news s…

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,…

[deleted]

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

#204

Post by gpas » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:10 PM UTC

In this site I've learned to be careful of what I write on the internet. I keep returning because almost everyone follows the same rule: write if you have something interesting to say politely, otherwise read and move on. It's quite the opposite of other famous communities (except for some subs on reddit) where everyone is fighting for karma points with memes and copycat comments or evidently pushing their agendas. Thanks to you dang and to everyone involved for moderating such an interesting place.

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

#205

Post by dang » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:11 PM UTC

bennysomething wrote: post #196

"to make space for a more inclusive, wider-ranging vision of technology" What on earth does this mean!? Hacker news will probably go the way of Reddit, steady decline in quality, and everything infected with politics.

Please see the links at the bottom of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I spent a lot of time getting those just right :)

Note that the last one or two actually predate Hacker News, because it was called Startup News for the few first months.

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

#206

Post by zozbot234 » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:12 PM UTC

laurex wrote: post #171

sveno wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only have 258 karma. You don't have to worry yet. When you get into the mid-thousands, that's when things get dicey. Tech is like card counting. If you actually figure the game out, you get punished and flushed out. If you keep gambling and losing and don't know why (because you're bad at what you're trying to do) there will be a seat at the table until everything is squeezed out of you.

Though I am reasonably active on HN, I actually have no idea what you mean. Could you go into more detail about 'the game' and what one should worry about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

...and I just lost.

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

#207

Post by dang » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:15 PM UTC

yamrzou wrote: post #194

Question for the mods (@dang): Do you not experience some kind of information overload from monitoring all those stories and comments on HN? How are you able to handle all of that? Otherwise I just want to say thank you for maintaining this forum and making sure it stays interesting.

At first it's like being paid to eat cheesecake: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... You stop enjoying the cheesecake, and then you stop eating it.

Later, it's like having one's brain sandblasted: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I don't remember most details but I pattern-match quickly.

It's probably not so different from doing any other rather-specific thing enough times.

I also wrote a browser extension with a lot of keyboard shortcuts that by now has close to 10 years of learning baked into it. It doesn't make any decisions but it lets me do repetitive things faster. One of these years I want to open source it (or make it a profile option to serve as JS) so people who like keyboard shortcuts can flip around the threads more easily. It just requires surgery to take out the mod-only bits, which is a bit like separating conjoined twins.

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

#208

Post by robertakarobin » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:19 PM UTC

zionic wrote: post #92

cogman10 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be frank, often when I see this glossy pamphlet cover for free speech, you open up the pamphlet and see a bunch of child porn, antisemitism and/or racism. The issue with free speech platforms is they attract a crowd of people whose only narrative is one that can't be said in other places. It isn't a narrative of truth, it is one of hate and bigotry. I've seen few examples where objective truth is banned. I have, h…

That’s just a flaw in your brain’s logical processing. I’ve seen this again and again, people will see an ocean of normal content anywhere free speech is allowed and laser-focus on the single floating turd. They’ll then mischaracterize the entire ocean as the turd, it’s like they have no sense of proportionality.

> people will see an ocean of normal content anywhere free speech is allowed

Not sure I agree on this one. Forums like /r/conservative, patriots.win, and Gab claim to be in favor of "free speech," but dissenters quickly get banned. 4chan comes to mind — people do indeed post things of all political slants there, and the only moderation seems to be removing obviously unlawful content. And yet 4chan is almost decidedly covered in turds.

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

#209

Post by mistermann » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:21 PM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #115

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…

> I "think", most of those debate ties with technology one way or another. Nah. Yesterday's political topic (there's almost always at least one per day) was about the WWII Tokyo firebombing. I think the real answer is even simpler: I think dang (or whoever is on duty that day) asks themselves "is this topic going to lead to an interesting conversation, or will it devolve into a shitshow?" Shitshows generally get cann…

> I think the real answer is even simpler: I think dang (or whoever is on duty that day) asks themselves "is this topic going to lead to an interesting conversation, or will it devolve into a shitshow?" Shitshows generally get canned, no matter the subject. It's benign dictatorship at work.

You're not wrong, I suspect....but as always, I am fascinated by how Dang and most people here seem to have utterly no curiosity about why the big brains at HN News re unable to engage in conversation about ~politics without it melting down into chaos like you'd find on most any other forum.

We often have these "serious" discussions about the dangers of climate change, fake news, etc, how it's super duper important that humanity gets its shit together, but is humans being able to communicate with each other in a skillful manner about difficult topics not plausibly a prerequisite for accomplishing these things that we talk about humanity "must" do? And if we not only can't do it, but refuse to even consider discussing the matter, then what shall become of the world?

I have been sternly warned about this message before, which I believe illustrates the validity of my point.

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

#210

Post by dang » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #185

One thing that puzzles me is why HN does not have a policy of banning users who post explicitly racist comments. I sometimes (unwisely) get sucked into arguing with these people. However, this is essentially impossible to do within the site guidelines, as you either have to have a respectful discussion with a racist (which only legitimizes them) or call them out for being a racist (which isn't allowed). I'm aware tha…

We do ban such accounts, and I've personally banned god knows how many of them. You're always welcome to email links to hn@ycombinator.com if you want us to take a look. Keep in mind that we don't see everything that gets posted here—not even close. For outrageously bigoted comments, the odds are high that we just haven't seen it yet. Any sufficiently large open forum is going to get those, and given that we don't know how to write software to detect them, there's an inevitable time lag before they get dealt with.

Outside that extreme sort of comment, though, the problem is not as simple as it sounds, or feels, because there's no consensus on how to define or interpret these terms. That means any particular moderation call is going to end up feeling wrong to a sizeable subset of users—good-faith users, not bigots or trolls. Put a few of those data points together and pretty much every reader is going to find a pattern to dislike. It's literally impossible to avoid this, even if we could see everything.

One consequence is that we/I regularly get lambasted with every horrible label that exists in polite society (a clarifying example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22941387), because most people misinterpret a sequence of bad-data-point experiences to mean "the mods must agree with and support this kind of thing".

I wish I could get across to people how these perceptions are unavoidable given the stochastics of the site (HN is a statistical cloud) and how our brains deal with randomness (by strongly overinterpreting it). I've been writing about this for years - a lot of which shows up in these links: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - but it doesn't really land. Even if one knows these things intellectually, it doesn't change how they feel, and the feeling determines everything.