Making changes that reduce the need for moderation are even better.
If you were to ask yourself: how much more could we be doing with a big community of people who are mostly highly educated and technical?
Is forums in the form we've had them since 1990 the optimal medium for a community?
I don't think anyone would say yes and yet I don't see any effort on behalf of the people who run this place to experiment and do anything remotely interesting.
The moderators on here do an admirable job but it ultimately feels to me like they're cops who are being asked to arrest people for smoking a joint. The solution to better policing is less policing, more community via better laws, the solution to better moderation is less moderation, more community, via better use of technology.
For a place that talks about new, this place feels exactly like what I had 20+ years ago elsewhere.
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 add-ons for a small fee that would cover the expenses. Run it as a non-profit.
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Has this been tried before? Is this the first time you hear of such a proposal?
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I'll throw in two more ideas - make any action taken by a moderator public, with blanked out content that is flagrantly illegal (links to child pornography)
Make it possible to dispute any moderator action for a fee, in other words move from a dictatorship to a democracy.
HackerNews need not be a dictatorship where what moderators think is good, is what's going to be enforced upon the rest.
There can be thousands of HackerNews that are filtered, sorted and moderated differently, based on people's preferences. This would be trivially made possible by asking people who'd be interested in such a service, to pay a small monthly fee.
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Trivial change - please make it possible to block specific users based on name/how long they've been registered on site for X-number of days. For example if I see someone routinely making comments I am not interested in, who does it benefit for me to continue reading their input? It only causes tension, it's like having to live with people you are fundamentally opposed to with no recourse other than leaving (no longer reading the comments section)
I predict this feature alone would decrease tensions among regular readers significantly, making your job easier.
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...
- 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.
#3 I think is a good suggestion though. We should have some means whereby users can exalt something good, not just flag something bad. The challenge is to make it different enough from the upvoting system so it didn't just turn into a variation of the same mechanism.