Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

blog.joinmastodon.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 497 posts

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#271

Post by theshackleford »

api wrote: post #63
burningChrome wrote: post #55

Looks like the inmates won again: Without linking to the posts, Rochko also mentioned that “a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer” led him to realize it was time to “step back and find a healthier relationship with the project.” It also drove the decision to restructure Mastodon.

I would never, ever want to have anything to do with running any kind of online community these days, or even anything adjacent to one.

It wasn’t that great 10 or twenty years ago either. I ran a sizable community in my county in the late to mid 2000s and got death threats, human feces mailed to my home, calls and visits to my place of employment and constant threats of various kinds of lawsuits.

Eventually my blood pressure was driven too high and I fucked it off. A high percentage of people are like barely functioning apes flinging shit and I just got over it.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#272

Post by deathanatos »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #234
deathanatos wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more the keming of the domain portion of the HN title, especially combined with HN's rather small font size choice (it's a meager 8pt¹!) there, and that it just happens that the mis-kemed result ends up with "John Mastodon", and is thus not trivially noticeable as "wrong"… (I read it the same way, too.) (¹I personally have a browser override for HN's tiny font choice; I thought that 12pt was the universa…

> keming Kerning? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning Also, if that was the mistake, it's kinda funny given the likelihood it was caused by a kerning issue.

An intentional "pun".

E.g., reddit.com/r/keming

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#274

Post by the_gipsy »

sedatk wrote: post #174
sedatk wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was also the largely held opinion of the community at a time Eugen didn't refer to the community when he declined implenting it. So, no, community wasn't a parameter at the time regardless what their opinion was.

The context for those who wonder what "single-handedly" means: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99662106175542726

He was right!

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#275

Post by mindcrime »

afavour wrote: post #265
Loughla wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real though. The moderation on this site is on point.

I actually think HN achieves the illusion of greatness via excessive moderation. It’s very easy for users to flag a topic from the front page and (IIRC) there are even automated downranks for threads that attract a lot of back and forth arguing. The result is a site with relatively measured debate but also a large chunk of missing debate. All that said I don’t have some genius idea about how to do it better so my cri…

Sure, some debate is missing here. But I think it's fair to posit that the debate in question is of low value, and that we're better off without it. Or, at worst, that losing it is a wash in the grand scheme of things.

In either case, the owners/operators of HN set a standard for the kind of discourse they want to encourage, and they take steps to encourage it. Nothing wrong with that. Reddit, Slashdot, 4chan, Twitter, and countless other sites exist for people with different tastes.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#276

Post by deathanatos »

m-hodges wrote: post #104
deathanatos wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more the keming of the domain portion of the HN title, especially combined with HN's rather small font size choice (it's a meager 8pt¹!) there, and that it just happens that the mis-kemed result ends up with "John Mastodon", and is thus not trivially noticeable as "wrong"… (I read it the same way, too.) (¹I personally have a browser override for HN's tiny font choice; I thought that 12pt was the universa…

It’s a Mastodon community joke. https://boingboing.net/2022/12/18/mastodon-users-embrace-col...

TIL! (Though I'd also wager that originated from someone having to squint at more bad kerning.)

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#277

Post by undeveloper »

mlindner wrote: post #198
bigiain wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, I suspect he's reasonably successful at being popular amongst the people he wants to be popular with. Taylor Swift is super popular in the demographic she plays to, while being unpopular with, say, techno or metal fans. Musk is super popular in the outspoken nazi demographic. (And has fallen way way out of popularity with huge parts of demographics that he used to be popular in, like electric car people, home…

> Musk is super popular in the outspoken nazi demographic. It's sad seeing such poor misinformed takes like this on hacker news. I guess Marc Andreessen and the President/Co-Founder of Stripe, among many others, are nazis now. It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists" that he's highly appreciated and many want to figure out how to replicate him. > and spaceflight fans. As a sp…

[flagged]

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#278

Post by hat_monger »

mlindner wrote: post #198
bigiain wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, I suspect he's reasonably successful at being popular amongst the people he wants to be popular with. Taylor Swift is super popular in the demographic she plays to, while being unpopular with, say, techno or metal fans. Musk is super popular in the outspoken nazi demographic. (And has fallen way way out of popularity with huge parts of demographics that he used to be popular in, like electric car people, home…

> Musk is super popular in the outspoken nazi demographic. It's sad seeing such poor misinformed takes like this on hacker news. I guess Marc Andreessen and the President/Co-Founder of Stripe, among many others, are nazis now. It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists" that he's highly appreciated and many want to figure out how to replicate him. > and spaceflight fans. As a sp…

> It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists"

You should start calling them “pro-India technologists”

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#279

Post by throwawayslur »

deadbabe wrote: post #267
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the other poster said, there's nothing worth losing sleep over in the comments here. Some people trying to start flame wars about politics, and a guy who thinks it's funny to drop racial slurs. None of those is good (and they are all flagged to death which is good), but neither do they make this comment section some kind of cesspool that would show why one is correct to distance oneself from Mastodon.

Sometimes I really wonder what the crowd I interact with here on HN is really like. Are they true tech intellectuals, or are they people who wouldn't hesitate to hurl racial slurs if there wasn't the threat of being banned or flagged.

I promise you, you can be both.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#280

Post by LexiMax »

darrmit wrote: post #257
LexiMax wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good that Hacker News has some form of human moderation, which is a lot more than what you can say about a lot of social media spaces. I wouldn't necessarily call it good, however. HN is absolutely teeming with bad-faith throwaway accounts, and too much faith is put in the user moderation side of things to police them. The user moderation itself is also given far too much leeway - I have lost track of the amount…

I would absolutely call it good given the volume of comments that flow through here. Not sure what other communities you’re referring to, but my experience over decades of forums and social media is that HN consistently somehow avoids the toxic fate of so many other sites and services like it.

> I would absolutely call it good given the volume of comments that flow through here.

That's part of the problem. A place this large, this public, and with this little amount of trust isn't really a community. It's the comments section of a content aggregator with a few engagement hooks via voting and user moderation. You can't really "hang out" here, there's no place to actually connect with other human beings unless you go elsewhere.

These days, it seems like most "community" spaces have migrated to places like Discord, Matrix, or even VRChat - places that allow for both public spaces and private, invite-only spaces. I've also found that Tildes feels like a community, despite being shaped a lot like Reddit/HN. I suspect that's due to the community still being rather small, not having open invitations, and making nearly all forms of gamified engagement positive.

For what it's worth, the largest internet community I knew of prior to the modern era of social media was Something Awful. And, frankly, it was _much_ better run than this place, or any other social media site, as it was moderated by dozens of actual humans who operated transparently - all moderator actions were publicly listed, and you could see the post and reason for the action. The site also charged $10 for access, charged you again if you got banned for breaking the rules or just not being a quality member of the community, and would actively seek out and ban anonymous alt accounts.

Post reply on HN