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.
Of course, this is true on any site. What bothers me about HN is that when it comes to such topics, the quality of discourse and thinking degrades so significantly from what one finds on regular topics. From my perspective, if the URL and layout/theme changed, from reading some example threads (culture war topics vs not), I'd never guess both kinds are taking place on the same site.
Of course, "people will be people", but the growing amount of polarization and vitriol online is starting to get rather concerning. I think it's fair to say that the quality of the userbase here is significantly higher than most other social media platforms, so I would be very interested in seeing if some reasonable tweaks could be experimented with to see if perhaps some approach could be found to narrow the quality gap between normal topics and culture war topics here on HN.
The main idea I've had is an experimental mode that HN could be run in for topics of this kind, just a few individual changes I can think of for such a mode:
- for downvoting, make providing a reason mandatory (pick from a list of 5 or so items)
- allow voting (up down) on more finer grained attributes (5 or so) - what those might be would require some thought, but it may be an interesting and non-harmful way to increase thoughfulness
- additional guidelines that strongly discourage:
--- stereotyping members of groups
--- mind reading
--- crystal ball gazing (using predictions of the future as rhetorical evidence in a disagreement)
--- speaking untruthfully (stating speculations as facts, and refusing to provide evidence when asked)
These behaviors are certainly frowned on if they're done "against the grain" around here, it might be a fun challenge for the majority to see what it's like to have to bite their tongues now and then. Or maybe if we were really lucky, perhaps more people would realize that a lot of the things they think are true, are often nothing more than memes, opinions/intuitions, or half-true media narratives.
Of course politics is one of the most contentious topics - always has been, always will be. The dumpster fires that are modern day Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit seem beyond rescue at this point, and mainstream journalism with its innuendo and opinion-based narratives isn't far behind. And unsurprisingly, I think it's rather fair to say that even HN has shown noteworthy decline in this regard. A common theme one often hears in these conversations is the sacredness of democracy, and how we must protect it. But if one is to mention in these threads the formerly non-controversial notion that what is actually True may have some sacredness to it as well, people seem to suddenly lose interest in the discussion.
Perhaps with some reasonable experimentation and cooperation, HN could become a place where people could once again discuss such topics with reason, logic, and truth. And if we could manage such a feat, perhaps we could also find a way to document these learnings and spread them into other social networks, perhaps lowering the amount of animosity in the world a bit in the process, altering the course of history to some degree. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and their ilk have little to gain (and much to lose) from experimenting with ways for people to get along better, so if they aren't going to do it, how are we ever going to get this country/world out of this downward spiral of anger? If no one is willing to do anything, then where is this road going to lead us in the end?