The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

>>capabl+(OP)
> Still, as an occasional reader, I have noticed certain trends. When stories that focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace, or on diversity in tech, or on race or masculinity—stories, admittedly, that are more intriguing to me, a person interested in the humanities, than stories on technical topics—hit the front page, users often flag them, presumably for being off topic, so fast that hardly any comments accrue.

I have noticed this trend for a long time also, and well before this article was first written. It seems to go in waves though I'll cautiously say that it seems to have gotten somewhat better in recent years. I remember a time in the mid-2010s when these kinds of stories would disappear almost instantaneously. Now some of these articles and topics get a good number of upvotes and occasionally even substantive dialogue.

That said, the comments sections on these articles do tend to devolve pretty quickly.

>>belfal+Nh
That kind of stuff has infected so much of modern discourse, if people want to talk about it there are plenty of forums for it. Why should we all stop what we're doing and prioritize discussing a niche political cause who's proponents have been blackmailing people everywhere into paying attention to them and have now come to dominate all sorts of forums and secure power, ironically with no benefit to the people they feign support for.

And when people say they want it discussed, they don't mean they want to read diverse opinions, they just mean they want to see orthodoxy regurgitated.

>>versio+Zy
Political threads often do go that way, and I understand the frustration. We don't want regurgitation—that follows from what we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

But the question of how to handle politics on HN is not simple. By the same principle of trying to optimize for curiosity, some content with political overlap is interesting and belongs here. The questions are which forms of it, how much, which particular links, etc.. I feel like after 10 years we arrived at a pretty coherent and stable general answer to that. Not that we get every specific call right—we don't. But the general principle has held up.

For anyone wondering what I'm talking about, here are some past explanations:

>>22902490 (April 2020)

>>21607844 (Nov 2019)

and some related points:

>>23959679 (July 2020)

>>17014869 (May 2018)

and there are lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... covering this.

>>dang+yA
Quick question for you: has there been any significant change in how HN handles the New York Times after 2019 specifically?

Looking over my front page archive, that's one of the first big site-related shifts I've noticed, and it's quiet pronounced:

   216   Year: 2007
   333   Year: 2008
   270   Year: 2009
   202   Year: 2010
   168   Year: 2011
   184   Year: 2012
   191   Year: 2013
   271   Year: 2014
   289   Year: 2015
   362   Year: 2016
   343   Year: 2017
   396   Year: 2018
   326   Year: 2019
    83   Year: 2020
    64   Year: 2021
    67   Year: 2022
    37   Year: 2023

I've not gone through to look at other domains specifically, but NYT typically shows up in the top 3--4 sites through 2019, then falls to #7 in 2020, #9 in 2021, and recovers to #5 in 2022.

That's a pretty big movement as these things go.

>>dredmo+4E1
According to the New York Times, no one noticed: https://open.nytimes.com/we-re-launched-the-new-york-times-p...

That cut looks a lot like a consequence of changing approaches to monetarization.

>>usrusr+NJ1
To be fair, what the NYT is claiming is that there were no technical glitches during the rollout.

People did notice paywalls going up.

zlacker