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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)

#71

Post by rainingcatndogs »

throwaway4220 wrote: post #64

This place is amazing, and I learned so much about a variety of topics. Most of my MD colleagues use Twitter or Facebook, where the signal-to-noise is much, much lower. I assume there have been plenty of spin-offs from HN (I would LOVE to have a similar forum for discussing medical issues; Can I fork the codebase somehow?), but I do think the secret sauce is moderation. Also, politically, I'm "an enlightened centrist…

>Can I fork the codebase somehow?

You can try: https://github.com/sebst/pythonic-news/ or https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

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

#72

Post by dang »

alexashka wrote: post #69
dang wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have concrete suggestions about how to reduce the need for moderation, I'd love to hear them.

Yes, poll people who invest in YC start-ups if they'd be willing to invest in start-ups that improve upon HackerNews forums. That should generate a few million. Then hire somebody with a proven track record to oversee proposals for additions to existing HackerNews. In other words, get money, then crowdsource ideas, then pay people to implement ideas with most votes, then provide beta tests, then provide HackerNews ad…

That's not a concrete suggestion, but rather a meta-strategy for getting those. Alas, I think it would run up against hard economics super quickly. Forums like HN aren't big businesses, and efforts to make them into big businesses exert pressures under which they turn into something else. This is probably the most important thing for understanding HN, actually: it ended up in a sweet spot where it makes sense for YC to fund it without needing to pressure it. Previous thoughts about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Re "please make it possible to block specific users" - this has been on the list for a long time but I have a feeling that it may go against the community in the long run. The more I get to know HN, the more I realize how important the non-siloed property is—i.e. everyone's in one big room together and can't self-select to get away from each other [1]. Of course, that makes HN a place where we all run up against things that are not only unpleasant, but actually shocking [2]. But I think that learning collectively to deal with that—learning to tolerate what that does to our nervous systems—is core work we have to do together, to keep this place vital.

Each internet community begins with different initial conditions, and if it goes on for long enough, those initial conditions get a chance to unfold into something unique. Trying to change the initial conditions after the fact feels to me like a bad idea. It's better to find ways to live with them, and maybe to steer their consequences, like sweepers in curling.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

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

#73

Post by mcguire »

"N-gate, a satirical Web site with the slogan “We can’t both be right” (a NAND gate is a kind of logic gate that only outputs “false” if all of its inputs read “true”), offers a weekly summary of Hacker News discussions, dubbed “webshit weekly.” The N-gate entry about a Hacker News discussion of a Times article on the crashes of two Boeing 737 airliners, in Indonesia and Ethiopia, is typical. “Discussing a pair of crashes that killed almost three hundred and fifty people,” it reads, “Hacker News can’t decide whether the failure was one of user experience or branding. Other Hackernews”—as it calls commenters—“think that this plane would have worked better if it were designed by programmers with a tendency to work late for free. A majority of the comments are Hackernews incorrecting one another about FAA regulations, avionics, and lift.”"

That's brilliant! :-D I'll have to check out N-gate.

Oh, this post? Typical newyorker puff piece, too long to read and unrelated to technology. Someone should flag it.

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

#74

Post by cgriswald »

saagarjha wrote: post #70
throwaway4220 wrote: post #64

This place is amazing, and I learned so much about a variety of topics. Most of my MD colleagues use Twitter or Facebook, where the signal-to-noise is much, much lower. I assume there have been plenty of spin-offs from HN (I would LOVE to have a similar forum for discussing medical issues; Can I fork the codebase somehow?), but I do think the secret sauce is moderation. Also, politically, I'm "an enlightened centrist…

Twitter can have a very high signal-to-noise ratio if you follow the right people.

Can it? Last I used it (which was a long time ago) Twitter itself added noise to my feed.

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

#75

Post by chki »

cgriswald wrote: post #74
saagarjha wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter can have a very high signal-to-noise ratio if you follow the right people.

Can it? Last I used it (which was a long time ago) Twitter itself added noise to my feed.

You can (and I propose you should) use Twitter with the chronological timeline feature enabled. It's why Twitter is usable for me while Facebook is not.

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

#76

Post by inglor_cz »

cgriswald wrote: post #74
saagarjha wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter can have a very high signal-to-noise ratio if you follow the right people.

Can it? Last I used it (which was a long time ago) Twitter itself added noise to my feed.

Twitter deliberately promotes outrage. While hateful screaming is nothing new in the world of politics (or elsewhere), for Twitter and other ad-sellers this is a way to capture attention of users and drag them into flame wars.

See this blog for one case thereof: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=46541

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

#77

Post by Dirlewanger »

fsflover wrote: post #16
Jaruzel wrote: post #3

Did dang promote this to the front page? :) Seriously tho... shout out to dang for all the hard work he does. (Please don't vote me up if you agree - I don't want the karma - just comment instead...)

Upvotes are not just for karma, they also show that you say relevant/important things and that people agree with you.

That's literally what they're meant for, but in practice it's an agree/disagree button, albeit not as abused as reddit's is.

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

#78

Post by dang »

throwaway4220 wrote: post #64

This place is amazing, and I learned so much about a variety of topics. Most of my MD colleagues use Twitter or Facebook, where the signal-to-noise is much, much lower. I assume there have been plenty of spin-offs from HN (I would LOVE to have a similar forum for discussing medical issues; Can I fork the codebase somehow?), but I do think the secret sauce is moderation. Also, politically, I'm "an enlightened centrist…

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.

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

#79

Post by pjc50 »

abfan1127 wrote: post #57
fsflover wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvotes are not just for karma, they also show that you say relevant/important things and that people agree with you.

what about relevant/important things that many people don't agree with? Preventing any community from becoming 1-sided seems like a hard problem to solve, but no less important.

One of the things that one can learn from HN is how to do this without necessarily having a confrontation.

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

#80

Post by kody »

cgriswald wrote: post #74
saagarjha wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter can have a very high signal-to-noise ratio if you follow the right people.

Can it? Last I used it (which was a long time ago) Twitter itself added noise to my feed.

I don't see "so and so Liked this tweet" in my feed, and I only see get a handful of promoted tweets, so it feels like they've eased up on adding noise to our feeds. I also set my location (arbitrarily) to Cook Islands, and now my "$LocalArea trends" widget is empty (thank God), so with aggressive culling I now have a Twitter feed that shows me what I asked to see.
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