781–790 of 812 posts
Are the moderators interested in automating their jobs at all? I really don't understand why the site continues to have no means to help people communicate better, other than a couple dudes that manually respond to people over and over all day. From a technologist perspective it seems archaic.
How can we automate our jobs?
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How can we automate our jobs?
By applying a process to begin identifying the needs for moderation and developing automated solutions. Later, designs can be modified to remove the need for the automation.
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You have focused on the stories being allowed on HN. My issue is with the aggressive throttling and shadow banning of users who post polite comments in support of unpopular* views (rather than just letting the upvote/downvote system do its job). I'm sure being a mod on HN is difficult, but by punishing users with throttling without explanation is not only rude, it creates the wrong incentive, turning HN into a game o…
Oh, I didn't realize (and if you said it, sorry I missed it) that you were talking about comments rather than submissions. We rate-limit accounts when they have a history of posting too many unsubstantive comments too quickly, and/or getting involved in flamewars. I know it's annoying and a crude tool, but it's one of few ways we have to address that problem in software. If I knew a less rude way to do it, I'd love t…
I appreciate the virtue of trying to carve out a space in the internet for a forum that is polite like a Tibetan monastery. I do.
However I don’t think that is a realistic goal to have when there is so much fake/misinformation floating around the world, and there are bad actors looking for every opportunity to spread misinformation into legitimate channels like HN in order to further their particular narratives.
Being patient and polite is one method to deal with misinformation, but a skilled actor is adept at spreading the misinformation while being equally polite and dragging out discussions to the point of attrition.
Unfortunately the Tibetan monastery falls apart when a bad actor like China decides to intentionally take advantage of these polite rules of discourse through subtle manipulation via misinformation, institutionalism, and other means to influence/protect a status quo with false narratives.
It is unfortunate that the HN rules value politeness, tolerance, and patience above eradicating misinformation and ignorance. Bad actors will intentionally take advantage of Tibetan and westernized rules to their own benefit.
We should not restrain ourselves in discourse with one hand tied behind our back when we encounter parties that spread misinformation and perpetuate more ignorance. Identifying individuals that are being less than honest in a firm, direct, and fair manner is more constructive than allowing the charade to continue. Sometimes those comments are flagged as inflammatory or offending the individual spreading bad information because their poorly informed ideas are under attack (rightfully so).
We can’t protect ignorance. All we can do is act with good intentions correspondingly exchanging information. When that like correspondence is repeatedly abused to ignore facts or spread misinformation, we must act instead of wait for good intentions to reveal themselves (a bad actor has no intentions of changing) and meanwhile hundreds or thousands of people have read and latched onto their misguided theories.
If the individual is being above the board, the facts will come to light and the situation is usually self-resolving. If the individual cannot defend their position, that is a good indication the HN community is perhaps better without that individual.
You may say that we should strive to create a culture of politeness and respect. I agree in so far as we must then come to terms with the fact that culturally, deception and dishonesty are also taken as being impolite and disrespectful—which presents a bit of a conundrum if we are paying close attention to our virtues.
Random downvotes without comments say you can’t think of a good response or reason to support your opinions.
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You said we weren't willing to hear you out, but that seems unlikely to me. People sometimes come to HN with stories of how badly we've mistreated them, but rarely provide links or enough information to let readers make up their own minds. Mostly these stories leave out important details about how the account had behaved and how we interacted with them. But we do make mistakes—moderation is guesswork, and we guess wr…
> We don't shadow-ban accounts unless they're new and show evidence of spamming or trolling, or unless there's evidence that the user has been serially creating accounts to abuse HN. That's a complete contradiction of the explanation you gave at the time. And yes, I asked what had happened when I noticed the account was shadowbanned, and your response was ---------- Hacker News Aug 31, 2018, 10:43 PM to me Politlcal/…
I can see why you are angry that we shadowbanned you, because that account went on to make other comments that were fine for HN. Indeed, quite a few were vouched for by other users. That's evidence of not trolling, and that sort of account is not the kind we shadowban—it's the kind where we post moderation replies, and tell people if we ban them. But those later comments didn't exist yet when I shadowbanned you.
Here's the information you need if you want to understand why we do things this way. HN gets tons of new accounts that break the site guidelines and in fact are created for that purpose, which is what I mean by trolling. We can't reply to them all, ask them to follow the guidelines and patiently explain where they're going wrong. If we tried, we'd do nothing else all day—or rather would go mad before getting there. Many of these users know perfectly well what the site guidelines are and have no desire to use HN as intended. If we poured moderation resources there, not only would it not work, it would make things worse, and meanwhile those resources would be unavailable for the rest of the site. For accounts like that, we use shadowbanning, and for the most part that approach works well. But it doesn't work in every case.
When a user emails us about such an account, we have to guess whether they're asking questions in good faith and really want to use the site as intended, or whether there's little hope of convincing them to do so. We don't always guess right. It looks like I guessed wrong in your case. The thing is, though, that when I sent you that detailed explanation of what was wrong with your comments and why we'd banned you, you didn't respond with any indication that you'd received the information and wanted to do something with it. Instead you responded aggressively. I get that you were angry that you had been shadowbanned and didn't know it. But that type of response is correlated with users who go on to be abusers of the site and are not people we can convince to do otherwise, no matter how many replies we give them.
All of this is pattern matching and guesswork. Your original comments and your emails matched patterns that are associated with abuse of the site. With hindsight I see that the pattern matching got it wrong, because your new account has gone on to be (mostly) an ok contributor to HN. (I say 'mostly' because, looking through its history, I still see unsubstantive comments and occasionally worse, but not bannably worse.) But I don't see what I could have done differently in any way that would scale. Our resources are meagre; we're constantly in triage. Patient explanation takes a lot of time and energy—it has taken me an hour to write this so far, and there are many more users demanding explanations than I have hours. Had your emails indicated openness to information or willingness to change, I probably would have replied further. But there are many users who fire multiple angry emails on each reply they get, and we've learned that they are not a good investment, when hundreds of other things and people are clamoring for attention and explanation.
Actually, I do think there is one thing we can do differently that is helpful in such situations: get better at handling anger. There are many users whose every interaction with us is angry and only angry. Often it feels like the intensity of their anger exceeds any of the provocations they're complaining about on HN, even if they're correct on those details. It's as if they're really angry about something else—something more important—but they turn that energy instead onto the extraneous outlet of HN and its moderators, maybe just because it's less important and so in a way safer. I find it difficult to be on the receiving end of this anger. At any moment, there are multiple people doing it. They don't know about each other, so they experience our interactions as individual and demand individual attention, while we experience it as a constant bombardment. It's possible to grow in capacity to handle this—it just requires a lot of personal work. You emailed us a year ago, and I've probably gotten better at this in the last year, so maybe the pattern-matching works a bit better now.
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Oh, I didn't realize (and if you said it, sorry I missed it) that you were talking about comments rather than submissions. We rate-limit accounts when they have a history of posting too many unsubstantive comments too quickly, and/or getting involved in flamewars. I know it's annoying and a crude tool, but it's one of few ways we have to address that problem in software. If I knew a less rude way to do it, I'd love t…
Late to comment here, but wanted to throw in something I haven’t seen in the article or scanning the comments. I appreciate the virtue of trying to carve out a space in the internet for a forum that is polite like a Tibetan monastery. I do. However I don’t think that is a realistic goal to have when there is so much fake/misinformation floating around the world, and there are bad actors looking for every opportunity…
Users are much too quick to reach for explanations like "you must be a foreign agent" when even the public record of the other user's comments—let alone the private data we look at—show that to be trivially unlikely. Foreign agents exist, of course, but foreign agents as an explanatory device for things one finds provocative online is, to a first approximation, a fiction. Same for astroturfing, shills, and the other things users accuse each other of in arguments.
That doesn't mean ignoring the possibility of manipulation—it just means that we should look for evidence. I can tell you that when we look for evidence, we basically never find it. Even if we're being fooled by clever manipulation in some cases, it's painfully clear that in the overwhelming majority, there's no there there. What there is, is people reaching for 'disingenuousness' as a simple explanation for what they find painful and offensive. That assumption blocks any solution. There's no way to resolve pain and offense without recognizing the experiences of the other side.
You mention China. I can tell you that all the flamewars I've seen about China since they started blazing in the last year or so have been examples of what I've said here.
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The study mentioned here indicates otherwise https://www.tuck.com/the-inequality-of-sleep/ "the likelihood of short sleep increased with greater poverty" Poor people are much more likely to work irregular shifts and night shifts, which have a serious impact on sleep.
It’s more complicated than that: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2861987/
Lower income and educational attainment was associated with more sleep complaints. Employment was associated with less sleep complaints and unemployment with more.
Rates of sleep complaints in African-American, Hispanic/Latino and Asian/Other groups were similar to Whites. Lower socioeconomic status was associated with higher rates of sleep complaint.
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Late to comment here, but wanted to throw in something I haven’t seen in the article or scanning the comments. I appreciate the virtue of trying to carve out a space in the internet for a forum that is polite like a Tibetan monastery. I do. However I don’t think that is a realistic goal to have when there is so much fake/misinformation floating around the world, and there are bad actors looking for every opportunity…
There are a number of problems with this, but the main one is that people's perceptions of dishonesty, disingenuousness, and manipulation in others are terribly exaggerated. Odds are that the other person simply disagrees with you—and if their view seems obviously outrageous, wrong, or stupid, this is because people are much more divided than we realize. Disingenuousness exists, but the assumption of disingenuousness…
That is to say that China was chosen for reasons beyond the literally obvious example of state agents. I know from experience state actors are rare, as well as being rare to detect. My rub is that latching onto China or Russia state agents as the only concerning actors that spread misinformation is not accurate. Somewhat more common are paid or unpaid social media shills/trolls that have many generalized accounts to forcefully influence topics.
But in my experience misinformation is spread most by those with vested interests, deeply gross misunderstandings of the world, strong attachment to personal biases they only believe and never bother to confirm or disprove empirically, reductionist and oversimplifications and un-nuanced tidbits learned from an introductory course of some topic, and so on.
These individuals overwhelmingly choose to ignore facts presented to them and espouse their incorrect views (perhaps hiding behind politeness or qualifications or an institutional authority). The view that such an individual will eventually with enough patience, see truth... is rather intractable and untenable.
I’m afraid you have latched onto but one example, possibly missing its purpose of imagery in the comment and neglecting to consider the other examples of bad information and bad actors which are actually fairly common that spread damaging tropes (that while inaccurate, continue to circulate nonetheless).
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This metaphor might be saved if you consider amount of (limited) public attention to be analogy to amplitude of sound. You can softly type in your niche forum all you want, but nobody will hear you if there is somebody else screaming into the twitter megaphone nearby.
But readers have a real choice and freedom on what to read, in that situation, what benefit does restrictions on writers bring?
When this happens across a large and popular enough cross-section of media, though, it could easily start to have a noticeable effect on readers.
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>Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats. Those threads wouldn't have passed the thousand comment mark if HN had anything close to a prevailing attitude on the matter. As with many contentious issues, people tend to believe HN is unilaterally biased against them, sometimes to the point of that bias being enforced by th…
Yes, and the reality is also that, if you run a company, you sometimes have to do what you have to do. If popular opinion turns on some policy or employee, you may have to make a tough decision whether or not it's something that you would necessarily do in the absence of potential business consequences. It's easy to second-guess or criticize such actions from the outside, but sometimes you just have to be pragmatic.
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There are a number of problems with this, but the main one is that people's perceptions of dishonesty, disingenuousness, and manipulation in others are terribly exaggerated. Odds are that the other person simply disagrees with you—and if their view seems obviously outrageous, wrong, or stupid, this is because people are much more divided than we realize. Disingenuousness exists, but the assumption of disingenuousness…
China was chosen as the example “agent” in this case because they are a nation that is emblematic of manipulation (in currency, IP theft, free markets, etc.). China was also chosen for the historical imagery, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee while capturing a peacefully sovereign Tibetan territory in 1959 and killing 87,000 directly in the conflict and 430,000 dead in the ensuing occupation. That is to say that China w…