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

Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–498 of 498 posts

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#491

Post by MrMcCall »

AlexeyBelov wrote: post #489
MrMcCall wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody thinks "wow, they said a true statement, I should downvote them". Precisely. That's the biggest problem with closed-minded fools.

I don't understand your point, sorry. Or maybe you misunderstand (on purpose?). I'm saying you attribute those downvotes incorrectly. It's maybe natural to do so as an instinct -- "those people are against me!" -- but on HN it's expected to be a bit more introspective. It's incorrect to say that "people downvote because I'm right" or "people downvote because they have nothing to say".

[dead]

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#492

Post by otterley »

MrMcCall wrote: post #491
AlexeyBelov wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your point, sorry. Or maybe you misunderstand (on purpose?). I'm saying you attribute those downvotes incorrectly. It's maybe natural to do so as an instinct -- "those people are against me!" -- but on HN it's expected to be a bit more introspective. It's incorrect to say that "people downvote because I'm right" or "people downvote because they have nothing to say".

[dead]

> To be 'ignorant' requires willfully _ignoring_ the truth

No it doesn't. To borrow from the law, ignorance requires no scienter. It simply means you lack knowledge of factual or situational context, willfully or otherwise.

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#493

Post by homefree »

pvg wrote: post #314
homefree wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

"Better sites" is probably the wrong phrase, you're right that most forums are worse.

I do think most interesting conversation has moved from forums to group chats and podcasts for this reason though. Scott Alexander's blog also had good comments (though on a narrower subset of topics).

Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

#496

Post by BergAndCo »

dang wrote: post #409
BergAndCo wrote: post #394

[flagged]

You should supply links to whatever accounts you had that were banned, so readers can make up their own minds about what happened and how fair or unfair we were. When someone makes claims about how they were unfairly treated, but won't let people look at the actual situation, that's sort of a tell. If the mods had actually treated them so badly, you can be sure that it would be pointed to with neon hypertext.

[dead]
Post reply on HN