The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

- Avatars. A consistent, recognizable image can go a long way from transforming a faceless internet post into something closer to a person you recognize and would hesitate to harm. With enough time and exposure, usernames can work for this (everyone recognizes when tptacek, or moxie, or you post), but avatars supercharge it. People hate changes to the site UX, so maybe put it behind a profile option that's defaulted to 'off' - then, only people who care about seeing them do. Of course, this would increase the moderation burden - people using offensive avatars, etc, but I think it could help.

- Heads on pikes. A weekly/monthly/ongoing/whatever roundup of notable bad actions which people have been moderated for. This should be limited to interesting and informative cases - not spam, piracy, CSAM, etc, but legitimate humans engaging in bad-faith actions, flame wars, etc. Having negative examples to avoid can help a community understand what is and isn't appropriate in a more concrete way than a dry set of rules. And seeing people be punished for violating those rules in a public way can have a deterrent effect. Making these public works better than just downvotes, because downvotes ultimately end up hiding content.

- Exemplars on pedestals. The obvious counterpart to negative examples is positive examples. In a way, the upvote system already does something like this, but it's not the same as officially-sanctioned recognition from the staff. A very simple approach might be to give you / other staff members (maybe even high karma users/yc founders) a button on each comment that highlights it as a positive example worth emulating - maybe changing the text color in css of the username/time stamp to show that it's been recognized.

Adding User 'flair' is perhaps a viable option, where users can simply tag other users with a short description. That enables both properties - avoiding discourse you find troubling, and allowing users to highlight those that they find enlightening.

Freedom of speech works well when paired with freedom to listen. Removing content (even if only from a user's view) only deepens the filter bubbles we're being shaped by.

[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493856

You are threatening to ban a community member simply for thanking Scott for the many ways he helped, and attempting to give some recognition to the tremendous work he put in. At some point I simply have to raise my arms and say “Ok, if you’re going to be completely unreasonable, even to the point of publicly lying, then I have no choice but to surrender.”

I am still astonished that you claimed that I didn’t spend years of my life working with Scott. He was my friend; I submitted nearly 200 pull requests to https://github.com/sctb/lumen/pulls dating back to 2017. He was also there for me during a dark period of my life, and that small act of kindness has stayed with me since.

I don’t understand your fixation with me. I challenge you to point out a single comment I’ve made, over the last year, that is in violation of any of the HN guidelines to such an egregious extent that a permanent ban is warranted.

I agree that this is a complete distraction from the overall goal of keeping HN happy and growing. So I propose that if you want this to stop, whatever “this” is, then you either need to explain in detail what it is I am doing wrong, or you simply must ban me and be done with it. And can you really argue that a ban is moral and justified on that basis?

I have done nothing to harm this community. Any reader who goes over my comments and seriously reads them would disagree with you that my presence here is harmful. YC founders have vouched for me, to you. I have 2k followers on twitter who seem to like what I’m doing. And I have absolutely no idea why you are fixated on me. From my point of view, you have harassed me for years for seemingly harmless comments. My wife has read almost everything I’ve written, and has proofread it, and she’s one of the smartest hackers I know; she agrees that I haven’t done anything wrong here.

You haven’t welcomed me back into anywhere. You permit me to post comments and to write for you at your pleasure. And I have tried hard to please you. But if you would simply leave me alone and get over the past — which is now three years past — then everything would be fine.

Your opinion has enormous influence. People will blindly believe pretty much anything you write. So you’ve now put me in a position of saying nothing and keeping my head down, or saying that Scott was indeed my friend and that we did indeed work together for years, as anyone with two eyes can see in Lumen’s pull request history.

In summary, I am happy to toe the line and do exactly what you want — you yourself have said that “we unban those who give us a reason to believe they will follow the rules,” and I submit that I have given you ample reason to believe I will. But if you want me to alter my behavior, then what exactly do you want me to do? Not write “Scott Bell was cool as heck, and it was fun to do some lisp hacking with him”?

This has gone on long enough. If this is to be my final reply to HN, then I suppose it’s fitting that it’s addressed to you: please relax, re-read my comments (and remember to assume good faith), and believe me when I say that I am trying, hard, to do what you want.

I asked my wife for advice on whether I should say anything, or leave this alone. She said she didn’t have any good advice for me, but that she would reply. She said that this is a stupid thing to do, and the fastest way to lose all the privileges I’ve worked hard to regain, but that she would do it, on the basis of “her brain would implode if she didn’t say anything.” And that’s always been good enough a reason for me.

With that, I suppose I’ll check tomorrow to see what happened. I hope you have a good day. I am sorry that my writing wasn’t perfectly happy and pleasant, but it was real.