Congrats and welcome!
Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
341–350 of 498 posts
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let us not use the word "thrive" or "quash" to avoid misunderstandings. To rephrase, I hope that on HN even minority opinions have reasonable rebuttals. Unfortunately what currently happens is people flag minority opinions with no discussion.
I agree that that's not a best practice. It's not what the downvote mechanism was intended for.
Flagging is used by people who have no rebuttal but are mad.
That's why I have only flagged one or two posts, ever, but not because I was mad, but because the comment was just plain beyond the pale.
And my posts against portaying violent rape in film got flagged.
Make it make sense, because I understand the failure of this system because systems are my trade-in-craft.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#343Welcome Tom! One thing I'd really like to see is less tactical flagging of content. Hopefully with your additional help, people who suppress content they disagree with will be kept in check. Open discourse is something that used to be sacrasanct in scientific and engineering circles. Over the last decade or so, free speech has been on the decline, and discussion is now very polarised along political lines. For exampl…
I understand, and lament, that the world is so polarised these days. There's a limit to what we in this little corner of the web can do to correct such powerful global macro trends, but we'll continue to try our best. If you see things that are unfairly flagged, you can email us and we'll look at them. As long as comments/submissions are within the guidelines, we'll restore them. We want HN to be a place where people…
How effective are vouches in this regard?
I'll do that reasonably frequently on both posts and comments, though I'm not sure how effective that is.
One sec, let's look at the endpoint ... First page (30 entries) for each shows, at this writing:
- 13 dead of 30 vouched, submissions.
- 26 dead of 30 vouched, comments.
The endpoints for the uninitiated:
Posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE&kind=comment
(The URLs are only visible to the owner of the UID, and I presume, moderators as well.)
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#344[dead]
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#345Many 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…
Welcome, Tomho W
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, Dan. I'd be really interested if you could share more about the metrics. As the climate of the world around us has changed, I think a lot of us at least feel flagging has become a cudgel used to silence opposition. Me, for criticism of the current administration. Others, for their views on topics like gender. Maybe we just care more and notice it about that subject now. Maybe it's always been this way. But while…
Dan and Tom can speak to this, but by my reading of the guidelines, "criticism of the current administration" and "views on topics like gender" are both explicitly prohibited: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ) It has nothing to do with being on the side of "the opposition" or "the man," it's because those sor…
No, I'm talking about stories that are extremely relevant to hacker news and techies.
Which is attested to by Dan repeatedly manually unflagging these posts afterwards, which is an explicit approval that these posts follow guidelines.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#347Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that's the 'receipts for everything' idea and if you think it through, you'll realize it's at a minimum impractical and more likely just an outright bad idea. Where are these 'reasons' going to go? Who is going to read them or act on them? It sort of wants to stick it to those bad flaggers and misinformed downvoters or whatever but think about it applied to you. Do you not recoil at being asked by some random w…
A lot of HN mechanism makes more sense if you can accept the idea that the goal is to promote good threads, and not, as so many people believe, to promote one set of opinions over another. Requiring justification for flags would immediately crud up threads with meta-debates. A hard thing for people to accept, something that I think is an unstated part of the HN ethos but nevertheless real, is that it's almost always…
I've taken to linking to moderator admonishments (mostly dang, occasionally pg or sctb) where I think it might be helpful, e.g.:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478913>
This is not for every flag, by a long shot, and occurs (checking my history) perhaps a few times a month.
Note that the follow-up to the above link also earned another dang cite. Few justifications are original...
The practice seems ... not too disruptive, and at least modestly effective. It also gives me a track record of who's turned up before.
Linking quips both keeps my own voice out of the discussion, and mutes the impact on the page itself.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
That ‘presumably’ is doing a lot of lifting and would be better supported by some examples of such posts.
[flagged]
The person you’re responding to is not Paul Graham. Similar handle but not identical.
> The people here are rather anti-compassion and any kind of spirituality. And how I was attacked for calling David Lynch a worthless purveyor of ultraviolence and vapid, wasteful lifestyles was unconscionable.
Maybe your problem is not with your opinions but with how you choose to express them. My observation is that disagreement is rarely downvoted massively if it is expressed eloquently. OTOH, emotional and brief conclusory opinions that aren’t supported with narratives or supporting information that are also contrarian may be subject to mass downvoting.
Looking through your comment history, I think you’re experiencing this phenomenon not because you respectfully disagree with others, but because of the quality of your communication.