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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)

#6

Post by awb »

Question for the mods:

In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

But I’ve seen more types of TV news stories going through, like stories about political protests, stories about politics in Eastern Europe, free speech debates, etc.

Without getting into the details of each particular submission I’m curious if you think the submission standards have remained consistent throughout the years or if your curation philosophy has changed at all and if so, in what ways?

P.S. Thanks for all you do as mods and for making HN an a valuable and unique community. It’s awesome to go to a thread and see helpful links or comments that enhance the conversation.

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

#7

Post by andrewfromx »

optimalsolver wrote: post #4

I've noticed that all the online spaces I enjoy visiting are heavily moderated. Whenever I get linked to "free speech" loosely-moderated platforms, I usually hit the back button pretty quick.

I can't wait for https://www.deso.org/ to take off, not just for the value of the coin to increase, but to see lots of nodes taking over the responsibility of twitter/fb/youtube etc's what's okay and what's not. There will be someone willing to run a node that has all the stuff blocked or unblocked to suit everyone's tastes.

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

#8

Post by edmcnulty101 »

awb wrote: post #6

Question for the mods: In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. But I’ve seen more types of TV news s…

It's very hard to define specific political content as separate from technology.

I remember a single Covid scientific paper turning into a 500 post political discussion.

Or tech giants and censorship and privacy. How does one separate tech from politics in this sense?

Maybe society has become more political and it's making it's way to link aggregator sites?

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

#9

Post by blurker »

I appreciate the repost. It's quite timely for me, because I had recently been reading and participating in a post about HN's apparent toxicity. This has helped me to gain some more perspective on the topic. Especially about how moderation is done. I'm really impressed by the moderators, I honestly had no idea how many people were moderating HN or how they did things. I admire the patience and care it sounds like they put into the community.
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