I've been reading "dang" as the word "dang!" without realising it's actually "dan g" all this time. :)
I thought it was a Chinese name
The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
41–50 of 812 posts
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#42Congratulations to "paulmd" for getting a flagged comment cited in The New Yorker!
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13094354 is the comment, which I find entirely reasonable but obviously people disagreed, or at least it was considered off-topic)
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#43Curious to know why this post has a "unvote" option. I don't recall seeing that before. Is there a link that explains what it does?
It’s not this story, it’s a global feature on both comments and stories which serves as a “undo” for fat fingering the upvote button. Before this feature you’d often see comments along the likes of “sorry, I accidentally downvoted you while trying to upvote.”
One great improvement of UI for HN, don't ask me how often I fat fingered before.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#44> On any given day, its top links might include a Medium post about technical hiring Isn't it quite ironic to see the article suggesting that HN top link might include Medium post. I've usually read not-so-positive feedback about Medium posts. Isn't it the case?
Medium has good content behind an increasingly infuriating presentation. Mechanically it's the opposite of HN, but for various reasons (reach, possibility of reimbursment) people do write some quality content there.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#45My experience with dang have been limited to him accusing me of making a personal swipe and me trying convince him that's not the case. I think sometimes overly sensitive moderation is not good.
For what it's worth, my only interaction with dang was being gently chided for a slightly glib dismissal at the top of a comment I made. The phrasing I used is very common (and treated as harmless) where I was brought up in Yorkshire. But he was right; without the benefit of that context it came over as rude. I've been a bit more careful since. Thanks, dang. A triumph of moderation.
That's been my experience too. It's the only online forum where the style of moderation has made me think twice about what I said.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#46> “There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work.“
Software might be eating the world, I don't think people will eat software anytime soon.
It's a good reminder that we can't solve all problems by just throwing some code at it. Unfortunately ...
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#47Shout out to dang! You're doing a great job! Thank you! Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. I wish good moderation was a skill that more people learned - would you ever be interested in writing a guide or teaching a class on moderation?
Is it just Strict moderation or Members with a common goal of making this place a good / fair place?
I think both combine to form a culture.
(In your HN settings, you'll see there's the ability to see deleted posts and shadowbanned users, and if you turn that on you'll see that most posts have a load a crazy people and trolls posting on them that the mods have cleaned up.)
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#48Shout out to dang! You're doing a great job! Thank you! Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. I wish good moderation was a skill that more people learned - would you ever be interested in writing a guide or teaching a class on moderation?
Is it just Strict moderation or Members with a common goal of making this place a good / fair place?
Bit of both. The moderation is necessary for keeping the community whole when we get influxes of trolls or redditors.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. Don't you find it a bit suspicious that the forum you happen to like is "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet"?
I don't know what you mean by "suspicious." I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts. The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up suc…
You might like Tildes. Here's their blog and docs which describe what Tildes is about.
You may also like Lobste.rs https://lobste.rs/
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#50Shout out to dang! You're doing a great job! Thank you! Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. I wish good moderation was a skill that more people learned - would you ever be interested in writing a guide or teaching a class on moderation?
I wouldn’t call it strict at all. He’s actually way more liberal about stuff than most over-bearing Reddit mods who think it’s their job to be editors of their own private newspaper rather than helping only when there’s no other option.
This is why dang is so good at what he does as it draws a difficult balance.