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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)

#281

Post by ethbr0 »

pratik661 wrote: post #276
ethbr0 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person) Twitter seems to value the individual, but devalue the content. (E.g. low quality posts by a famous person) The former is more meritorious, inasmuch as the vote base can accurately judge a comment. The latter is more consistent, in that popular people stay popular (and admittedly, are popular for a reason). P…

Thats an interesting observation. Username based forums value the content, while Twitter (where your identity is public) values the individual and his/her expertise. The issue with the former is that it relies on upvotes of people from the community. This leads to the problem of people upvoting comments on topics in which they lack expertise (ie developers upvoting comments about astronomy that "sound right") This re…

I think the ideal system would be HN-style with ML informed analysis and user weighting.

E.g. if someone versed in cryptography upvotes or downvotes a cryptography story/comment, that counts for more than someone random

And I only care because the expertise gap is really the only flaw in HN/Reddit style ranking. In all other ways, it seems superior.

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

#282

Post by SkyMarshal »

rattray wrote: post #230
SkyMarshal wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I followed a lot of economists (ie Robert Reich, Krugman, etc) thinking they would post interesting economics related content. I think you have to stop following famous people like those guys, and instead follow up-and-coming economists and other scientists and bleeding edge researchers/builders, who are working hard to make a name for themselves with novel research in some interesting area. Those are more likely t…

This is a really good idea. Any accounts you'd recommend in particular?

A few that come to mind are:

The New England Complex Systems Institute - https://necsi.edu/ (Twitter link at top right)

London Math Lab’s Ergodicity Economics group - https://ergodicityeconomics.com/ (Twitter feed in left column)

Any PI running a research project of interest to you at the Santa Fe Institute - https://www.santafe.edu/

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

#283

Post by dgritsko »

webmaven wrote: post #244
dgritsko wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've started using the Lists feature of Twitter a ton, carefully curating users who tend to post around specific topics that I'm interested in. Then I just poke my head in the appropriate list whenever I want to catch up on what's been happening in a given subject. Totally changed my Twitter experience.

> I've started using the Lists feature of Twitter a ton, carefully curating users who tend to post around specific topics that I'm interested in. Then I just poke my head in the appropriate list whenever I want to catch up on what's been happening in a given subject. I've been doing the same (although I've actually been on a break from Twitter for over a year now). Care to share links to your lists? BTW, it took me f…

I think the best example I can share is one that I actually can't take credit for, came across it a few weeks back. It's a list of people actively working on .NET: https://twitter.com/i/lists/120961876 My own lists aren't ready for "primetime" yet :)

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

#284

Post by dang »

js2 wrote: post #255
raverbashing wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how many of those flags are just misclicks or "I don't like this" button, but I guess the noise level is higher than expected

It’s easy to flag submissions by accident and I’ve definitely done that and had to unflag them. I flag submissions on purpose fairly often when I feel they are really poor quality, spam, or way off-topic for HN. I also flag submissions where the discussion has gone off the rails. Flagging a comment takes extra work because you have to click through to the comment. I’ve never done that by accident and tried to only do…

Should we add a temporary "unhide" link that appears after you hide a story? If so, where should it appear?

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

#285

Post by dang »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #232

Maybe Dang will never read this, but I appreciate the patience and logical (useful and firm) directions he gave when I stepped outside the posting rules for HN. Thanks Dang, I actually learned something from how you dealt calmly with a random internet poster. Cheers, and bravo.

I did read this and appreciate your posting it!

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

#286

Post by dang »

felix12777 wrote: post #229

You're not alone. We read and learned so much from you. And your moderation makes our knowledge hunt simpler. I'm wondering what would be your next milestone to make HN more useful?

The next big milestones are to finish a new Arc implementation that should help with our performance issues—I've been stuck on that forever. And then to build the next version of the API.

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

#287

Post by dang »

krapp wrote: post #176
dang wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we'd go for #1 because it's core to HN that it's a text-only site. And #2 is too shaming. We've found over the years that under punishing people (relative to what they expect) is more effective. There's a nice user report about that somewhere in the current thread. (edit: actually several now, which is pretty cool) #3 I think is a good suggestion though. We should have some means whereby users can exalt…

Can I do one? The UX for paginated threads is awful. I know you want to get rid of it, but I really hope you don't, because reading through something like the 4000 comment Biden thread as a single page would be incredibly taxing, and having to go through 'more' links to get to recent content is annoying. Long threads do need to be paginated, but I think you should consider what other forums do and add a set of page l…

I still want to just get back to what HN always used to do, which is just render the entire page fast. As long as the page loads quickly, I don't see why a 4000 comment page would be more taxing than having it spread across multiple pages - one can simply stop reading, no?

Better links for navigating around large threads is on the todo list too...

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

#288

Post by dang »

joshxyz wrote: post #263
mayank wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL it's "Dan G" and not the Chinese surname "Dang" that I'd always assumed.

Also surprised to learned that back then, but it's too late I already got used in reading it as "dang"

In my head it's always been "dang" as in rhymes with "clang". dan+g is just the etymology.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767296

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

#289

Post by dang »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #256
foota wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following their post history, it looks like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 .

Thanks for linking that. TIL: sorting rank is a function of timestamp and votes, so when the mods push a story back to the front page, instead of special-casing the behavior, they just (get a computer to) fabricate a submission timestamp that puts the story in appropriate place on the front page. It's a clever hack, alright, but dang if I didn't start to think I was going crazy, because something felt off with timest…

It's not a great solution because it confuses the people who notice. The problem is that it's even more confusing if we re-up posts that say "3 days ago" or whatever onto the front page. Then the threads fill up with "why is this 3 days ago post on the front page"?

Another option would be to clone the old submission into a new one, but then we get more dupes. And I don't know of any viable fourth option.

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

#290

Post by dang »

webmaven wrote: post #242
dang wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original codebase is at http://arclanguage.org/ and many forums have started with it over the years. One of these years we'll release an update of it that incorporates a lot of the changes we've made to HN.

> The original codebase is at http://arclanguage.org/ and many forums have started with it over the years. > One of these years we'll release an update of it that incorporates a lot of the changes we've made to HN. Out of curiosity, absent such a release, is there a public changelog anywhere? If not, that would be a great start.

pg used to do one, but I forget the URL. We should probably start again.
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