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Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

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Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#311

Post by Lerc »

pvg wrote: post #192
Lerc wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a shame that people will downvote a thing that is expressing an honest opinion. I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button. I don't think this extends to the way that HN is moderated or run. It is worth looking at dang's posts every now and again to take in the job that he does and how patient he can be, even with antagonism aimed directly at HN or himself persona…

I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button. That's a valid use of the button by design, HN is literally made to allow for that use. Plus it mimics real life interactions - there is a social cost/friction to saying things people disagree with or think are outright wrong. Most online chitchat places deteriorate because they remove such social frictions.

I would say it mimics real life interactions of some communities. I do not think that is universal. I tend to think that the communities, in real life and online, that permit civil discussion of dissenting opinions are the healthier ones.

I think there is a far greater real life social cost in violating standards of behaviour, such as aggressive engagement, or acting without empathy. I would argue that it is those influences that can be lacking in online discussions that cause them to deteriorate. There is also a lower barrier of entry for joining an online community than joining a real life community. A few dedicated but detrimental people can always evade safeguards and pollute a community to some degree, online communities being larger provide the possibility to each individual to do more damage, while also increasing the chances of there being individuals that would do so.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#312

Post by Karrot_Kream »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #141
theoryofx wrote: post #20

One thing that I appreciate about dang, and PG before him, is their intellectual honesty and strong sense of ethics. On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business. But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition, its been capable of unreasonable greatness and r…

I was there since around 2015 and the evolution of that forum and its population/opinion has been very interesting, to say to put it mildly... Remember when the biggest disagreements were about ORM & Frameworks? I miss those days. I didnt even mind the discussion about the ethics of Uber or Airbnb, but now, now it is different, & not for the better.

I think HN has been gradually losing what makes it unique. The net is filled with BOFH-style pro-FOSS tinfoil hat tech content and has been since the early '90s. The joke among my college cohort about Slashdot was that IT Helpdesk 1 will have strong opinions on how MSFT execs were engaged in crazy conspiracies. You can find that kind of content anywhere that tech people talk. HN's value proposition for me has always been informed commentary; industry insiders, academics, and practitioners weighing in based on their domain expertise. Today's HN feels a lot more like a rumor mill for random people interested in tech. Along with this shift has been a widening of scope where we don't just talk about tech but also general politics. In general, HN has been gradually trending to be just another big tech subreddit.

These days HN reminds me a lot of Reddit r/programming in the early 2010s. To me this isn't a good thing because I used to come to HN to specifically get informed commentary. But there's no way for a site as big as HN to be dominated by informed content anymore because there just aren't that many people working on interesting tech in the world. So I do what most others do I suspect which is talk with friends from my alma mater and old jobs in group chats and share HN links and laugh at the unhinged, uninformed comments.

I do think at this point HN has changed its appeal. I feel that people today are attracted to HN because of its raucous, rumor-mill feel rather than informed commentary.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#313

Post by basisword »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #305
sanswork wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So been here slightly longer and the only shift I can recall is a shift away from business to tech. Early days had a lot more discussion about the business side of startups and vc. Then it started shifting more towards tech too the point now where startup/business discussion is mostly limited to Show/Ask posts.

The loss of chatter around the soft skills around tech (so business but also UI/UX design, design patterns, organizational approaches (like holocracy), planning processes, etc) has made HN a lot less interesting IMO. If I just wanted the usual tinfoil hat FOSS BOFH content, then I can go literally anywhere else. Reddit, Matrix, IRC, Telegram, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, they're all full of it. Then there's the wideni…

Is this because many of the soft skills you mention were in flux/being 'disrupted' 15 years ago and since then they've become the accepted norm? I enjoyed that content too but feel like it was a time where startups were changing the face of how companies operated and now most businesses follow those models and they're not yet ripe for change again.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#314

Post by pvg »

homefree wrote: post #303
pvg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think your dissenting opinions should be popular, your opinions probably aren't all that dissenting. This person's dissenting meta-opinion is unpopular, it's still there and it's still being discussed. Discomfort is inherent in dissent, it's not people putting a lot of likes on your NormanRockwellFourFreedomsPainting.gif.

It's not that they need to be popular, it's that voting them down leads them to be dropped off from view (and makes it less likely dissenting views will be shared). Reddit is the extreme case of this where anything outside the majority group consensus is heresy to be voted down/hidden/banned. Better sites don't do this and have in-good-faith discussion despite disagreement.

Can you link some of these better discussions on better sites?

Dissenting views are regularly highly visible, often as replies to consensus views. Even better - well-argued counter-narrative/counter-conventional wisdom views regularly appear as top or highly ranked comments. That's because the people making those arguments do what sensible people do when making an unpopular argument - they put in the work to make their case more persuasive. They don't sit around complaining that the other kids don't listen to them, they care about their issue enough to try to work with human nature rather than hoping some magical technology will change human nature for them.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#315

Post by carstenhag »

dang wrote: post #291
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #275

Dang, and Tom: I think it would be useful for you two moderators to use a "special" color, instead of the light gray that is used for any other username.

I've always resisted that, and I suppose it's fair to say pg did too. It feels like an unnecessary barrier between us and others.

It does feel very natural on Reddit (where mods can enable a flag/green user name when it's a mod response).

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#316

Post by cbeach »

fwip wrote: post #224
cbeach wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If stating certain facts is made illegal (by our democratically-elected representatives) then by all means HN will need to censor those facts for the sake of its own self-preservation. But until then, we should be free to state facts. > The old adage “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it” was once a touchstone of liberal society. Having been involved for most…

"Stating facts" does not mean you are following the other rules of the site. For example, if you irrelevantly post "My software is on sale now for 10% off and here is the link!" on every story, everything in it is factual, but it's spam regardless. I'm sure your specific facts that you want to post are in service of a particular social or political viewpoint you are trying to push, one that the people flagging find e…

I'd love to be clearer about my common-sense, scientifically-backed viewpoints, but if I did so it might result in hostile action being taken against me. So I choose not to.

Not because I'm insincere about my views, or because I believe they are harmful - but because the activists pushing the ideological views I oppose have been demonstrably violent and destructive.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#318

Post by AnimalMuppet »

bee_rider wrote: post #273
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I draw a distinction between posts and comments here. Comments that are "pushing an agenda" are noticeable because they Just. Will. Not. Deviate. From. The. Party. Line. Ever. They will never acknowledge an opposing viewpoint's point, no matter how valid. It's not a good faith conversation, and it deserves to be both downvoted and flagged. When one side (or both!) is like talking to a brick wall, this is often what's…

Despite being a small-ish site, HackerNews does still suffer from the Reddit problem of having enough users that you often don’t get to really know anybody. Realistically most conversations here only go back and forth for like 3 or so comments on each side. I mean, the site is structured to promote that kind of thing; reply buttons start getting hidden after a point, right? I don’t think anyone really can be convince…

All right, here's an example. X makes a post on one side of a position. Y makes a thought-provoking reply on the other side. X replies with "So what's your point?" X either fails at reading comprehension, or X is trying to make it look like Y didn't have a point, because X doesn't have a good reply to Y's point, and X wants everybody else to not notice that Y actually had a good point.

I hate seeing that. It's a bad-faith argument. It's the sign of someone who's just there to argue, not to have a curious conversation. That is, it's a sign of someone who isn't within the spirit of the site guidelines.

No, I don't think this is just my personal bias against that style of posting. It's fake and juvenile, and it has no place on HN.

Another way you can tell: When they're replying to 20 comments with the same 2 or 3 talking points. That's someone who's there to do battle, not to have a conversation. They aren't really replying to the 20 comments, either - they're just spraying the same canned responses all over the place. That's not a conversation; that's a tape recorder in transmit-only mode.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#319

Post by Karrot_Kream »

basisword wrote: post #313
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The loss of chatter around the soft skills around tech (so business but also UI/UX design, design patterns, organizational approaches (like holocracy), planning processes, etc) has made HN a lot less interesting IMO. If I just wanted the usual tinfoil hat FOSS BOFH content, then I can go literally anywhere else. Reddit, Matrix, IRC, Telegram, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, they're all full of it. Then there's the wideni…

Is this because many of the soft skills you mention were in flux/being 'disrupted' 15 years ago and since then they've become the accepted norm? I enjoyed that content too but feel like it was a time where startups were changing the face of how companies operated and now most businesses follow those models and they're not yet ripe for change again.

I honestly don't know. On the one hand you're right, we were in a time when startups were doing things like experimenting with holocracy. On the other hand, companies and cooperatives are still today experimenting with more efficient, equitable ways to get things done. I feel quite disappointed that so much of the anger over inequality in this community gets aimed at US or international politics rather than discussing things like corporate or cooperative structures which is both more grounded and more easy for many of us as practitioners to action.

To me it feels more emotional catharsis than intellectual discussion; getting mad at politics is getting mad at something you can't control and so is more of a way to air out your emotions. Getting mad at corporate structure or envisioning a cooperative is something we can control and requires more rigor to engage with.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#320

Post by MrMcCall »

tomhow wrote: post #173

Many thanks for the warm welcome, everyone. It’s been a privilege to help support this community and to work alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years. It’s a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving community, and I’m continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts thought and energy into it. One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected…

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