Seriously tho... shout out to dang for all the hard work he does.
(Please don't vote me up if you agree - I don't want the karma - just comment instead...)
I always thought it was just a mild expletive that reflected the role of moderation
As a web developer, the more I do the more I crave novel challenges. Writing CRUD apps or getters and setters gets old fast.
Are there novel challenges with content moderation?
edit: Im not saying the moderators have stealth accounts!
At the same time, being able to read and learn from other people’s thoughts is always a stimulating experience. It gives opportunities to develop better mental models on certain things and also be able to explain certain things better to others.
So yeah, there are pros and cons, but I wouldn’t want to do this without a few other people who can take the workload and provide a break when it gets too tiring and exhausting.
Thank you both for your work!
> If you read the profile the New Yorker published about us last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article (and it's something of a miracle of openness and intelligence that she was able to get past that—the shock experience really is that bad).
Swift invisible action when facing bad faith actors; sporadic public call outs for quick attitude correction; and consistent helpful presence like multi-page reminders and clarifications on the inner workings of this forum.
I find your style of moderation to be the golden standard on how to foster a healthy online community.
I agree that he does very fine work here.
In that context, HN consensus on downvoting jokes makes more sense. I like a good joke, but they belong on the bottom of the page after the "serious" conversation. It's unfortunate that it's overloaded with karma, but complicating the upvote/downvote system has other drawbacks.
You've helped keep HN readable, corrected countless title and link errors, and prevented heated discussions from devolving into fights.
I also am super thankful for your help getting my "Show HN" post to the front page.
We all appreciate you.
Unsurprisingly, I’ve found levity is best received when incorporating a kernel of fact or observation. Also, timezone matters.
Jokes are easy. Comedy is hard.
> There's clearly a pattern here. I'm not going to ban you now because you've also posted good comments, but please don't post any more personal attacks to HN, and please avoid tedious tit-for-tat entanglements with other users where the argument slides further to the right of the page as it slides further down in quality.
It sounds pretty stupid to say that I had a change of heart moment there, but I did. Whether or not I disagreed with another user on the internet was besides the point -- what was I getting out of /engaging/ with it that way? Was I acting the way I would want someone else to behave in a community? Of course not.
It turns out (as is often the case) that I was /extremely/ unhappy with my old job, burnt out and really struggling to keep it together and prevent the toxicity of my management chain from seeping into my personal life. Altogether very unsuccessfully, I might add. So I left. I didn't like the person I was turning into on the internet, pandemic or not.
Now, in retrospect, while I don't disagree with the content of what I said, I cringe with how I said it, and that I even engaged in the first place. In large part because that kind of engagement goes against the spirit of this forum which I cherish so much and find a reprieve from much of the rest of the internet.
A reprieve in large part due to the tireless, high quality work of @dang -- a reprieve that I myself threatened. Now isn't that self-destructive and ironic? Well, if you're reading this @dang, thanks for not banning me. You taught me a valuable lesson which I already knew but which just wasn't sinking in. I'd like to hope I am beginning to more deeply internalize the lesson you taught me that day.
The drama is exciting though.
Thank you @dang for your diligence and commitment to the task.
That being said,it does take skill to squeeze in a dad joke in a discussion of abstract computing problems related to 8081s and I'll go on a limb that HN not lenient on badly executed D-jokes as say reddit would for the attempt.
Not that I disagree with the characterization, but the New Yorker criticizing other people for performative erudition is the funniest thing ever.
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.
Also, politically, I'm "an enlightened centrist" lol and nearly all of the political spectrum here is represented well IMO, and even personal attacks/strawman arguments are not immediately banned but first discouraged.
Thanks dang!
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.
---
Has this been tried before? Is this the first time you hear of such a proposal?
---
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.
---
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.
You can try: https://github.com/sebst/pythonic-news/ or https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters
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...
That's brilliant! :-D I'll have to check out N-gate.
Oh, this post? Typical newyorker puff piece, too long to read and unrelated to technology. Someone should flag it.
See this blog for one case thereof: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=46541
One of these years we'll release an update of it that incorporates a lot of the changes we've made to HN.
He also let me back in after I apologized via email, which I appreciate.
I have since lost faith.
HN likes to masquerade as some sort of upscale establishment, high and above the petty squabbles of Eslewhere, but in the end this place too devolves into a predictable echo chamber just like the rest of them, when it comes to any topic on which people have varied opinions.
This is not a place for dissenting views (such as this comment). This community does not brook any disagreement, because this service is not designed for it.
This did not happen overnight; for more than a year I have been watching perfectly fine comments getting buried in the gray for not siding with the prevailing mob on divisive topics. Even neutral, soft-spoken stances get struck down.
One can now reliably predict what the majority of comments are going to be like, just by reading the title of a post.
I've brought this up several times with dang, but apparently you're not able to appreciate these problems until you try participating as a regular user.
And let's not even mention the awful UI design with its vendetta against eyes, low light and small screens.
HN is broken, and one of the major indicators of a broken service is a tone-deaf management who continues to insist that everything is Working As Intended.
Most of my life has been spent moderating online communities. Needless to say why, I am trying to mimic the style of moderation I have been on the receiving end of.
Keep up the good work!
It might just be because I have a terrible memory for usernames, but it would be nice to be able to immediately see "Founder/CEO of Initech" or "Expert Bananacurist" next to the name.
I think about HN as a place where we share ideas, playful place regardless of how complex a topic is.
The main point is to put in the spotlight ideas, not people. Attacking an idea is ok, attacking people is not.
This isn't a place where dissenting opinions get upvotes. Why should they? I think a fair of posters with plenty of karma are still willing to post things that get massively downvoted and cause a reaction. I'm getting better at it. I keep a mental model of how I've reacted to HN, look at the page - "there's the reaction, down five or ten points", "hmm, I'm guess down and up votes balanced", "ah, that was a crowd pleaser".
I don't think hn is more broken than America or the Internet or whatever.
- 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
I would like to raise one point that's tangentially related: why is it not easier to find a page explaining the community guidelines ? AFAIK you have to look them up yourself.
The navbar has links to new, threads, past, comments, ask, show, jobs and submit, but none of them even give a clear redirect link to get to the guidelines ... wouldn't it make sense to add them to nav, or configure the site such that they're displayed the first time you visit ? Always seemed a bit funny to me from a design perspective.
edit: made it more generic
Probably worth flagging rather than increasing its visibility?
Ironically, under front page HN submissions where comments would give some context, often there are none. Who upvoted them all the way to the front page? People who want to feel intelligent? Edit: this may be related to the moderator's override function where they put some submissions manually on the front page.
^ My favorite line in the whole piece. It resonates.
Apart from an obvious problem of too many people having downvoting privileges, mods here also silently downweight some accounts even though they leave perfectly good comments. So there are two parts of this problem: mods being assholes towards some people regardless of their comments and mods letting too many people downvote comments. Same problem with flagging, except that flagging doesn't just make some discussions taboo, it also provokes mods to come up with a reason to issue a warning to silence such discussions even more if they feel like it.
But let's be honest, HN was never a place for dissenting views or "intellectual curiosity" as they used to say, it was always a very US, Silicon Valley capitalist-owned place, where the mods, YC tried to push people into one or another direction, push people to think certain way, suppress and disallow some viewpoints under various pretenses. I'm sure you've seen them claim guidelines breaking of people expressing some views, but never the opposite views if the views happened to be a common SV ideology (for example, I don't think I've ever seen an "let's ban sexist words" diversity activism being warned as "ideological flamebait" or such activists being banned, but it did happen with people holding the opposite views, just like it did with the guy from Google). All of this nudges people into echo chambers.
I'll add that it used to have more technical discussions a few years ago, but not so much anymore, you have to go to lobsters and reddit for that, even if they suck, they are at least still there.
Community sites like HN fall into many common pathologies. Your laser focus on avoiding those traps, and intentionally chasing positive models, has me always looking forward to loading the site and diving into the discourse.
Actually, it predates that; referring to when a new crop of undergraduates would arrive at schools on the Internet.
There's one big silo, with the people who have stayed within it, and the people who have left outside it.
There aren't very many women here, which I assume is because of how the HN conversations about issues important to women tend to play out. This isn't an HN-specific problem, it's industry-wide. But I didn't go into software until my 30s, so the gender skew of the industry feels alien and alienating to me.
I would ditch HN if I discovered another tech community which was more inviting to women. I don't care if I start to miss out on the HN-resident perspectives on gender which shock me, because there are other perspectives which are more important to me which I'm already missing out on.
(They're also not in the footer of the comment page and a link in the otherwise empty header could be useful for new users.)
#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.
2. I got warnings beforehand and deserved it.
There's a pandemic on. Voting has been a bit wonky this year, probably because of the pandemic. People are cranky and scared and yadda.
But normally HN is much more tolerant of dissent than most online spaces, assuming it's done right. Rants that call other members names or that implicitly or explicitly suggest "This will be downvoted because you are all bad people" or similar is not how to do that.
On the other hand, like usual, the people who should read them the most, are probably the least likely to do so. Also the forum is somewhat self-regulating now?
I read quite often, when someone misbehaves, others chime in and ask them nicely to not do that here.
That sounds interesting! How were these built? In the same Arc language? Any chance this can be open sourced?
Rather than getting annoyed, as would often happen elsewhere, I was ashamed. Because dang was right and I was wrong.
Thanks for that.
Unfortunately not, because we don't know how to write anti-abuse systems that keep working once people know what they are.
Agreed for the actual Twitter site, but it doesn't seem to happen nearly as much with Tweetdeck. (In fact, I'm not sure Tweetdeck even shows ads.)
I don't think Twitter can have the same signal to noise ratio as a well moderated forum like HN, even if you follow the "right" people, because the format of the site incentivizes a different style of discussion.
HN is like an Ivy League freshman class. Most of the kids are smart, opinionated and sure they will rule the world some day.Many have some pretty nice accomplishments. But you scratch below the surface and you will notice they are also just a bunch of kids: insecure,especially about their intelligence,they take themselves way too seriously, love one-up each other and beyond their close area of knowledge they have painfully naive//cliche views.
Dont take this site too seriously, especially since in the last 2-3 years it has been infested with "guerilla marketers"
I would guess that you have rules based on patterns of observed behaviour, and that they do 80-90% of the effective blocking.
I too would like to thank the moderators.
Further, and more interestingly to me, I learn that HN is written in a LISP variant called ARC... I've never understood LISP, and especially never thought that anything useful could be built with it... at least at the subconscious level, yet I know AutoCad and Emacs are built around it. I have similar feelings about Prolog, which I tried once and just didn't grok.
Is there an IDE for lisp?
So might "boolean NOT", to maybe be a bit more programmerly.
There is a great deal more female participation than there used to be. It's just not obvious for various reasons, but it's something I have paid attention to over the years and used to keep private data on to some degree.
Twitter seems to value the individual, but devalue the content. (E.g. low quality posts by a famous person)
The former is more meritorious, inasmuch as the vote base can accurately judge a comment. The latter is more consistent, in that popular people stay popular (and admittedly, are popular for a reason).
Personally, I prefer the HN-style model, but I also believe it only works as long as the ratio of HN-encultured users to bad / average actors stays above a certain threshold. From a technical and vote system perspective, HN isn't that different than Reddit: what makes it HN is the culture and community.
I have vanished from several places like twitter, reddit, linkedin... HN is the place I come daily to read the news and often share my personal projects.
Thanks Dang - and everyone else - I sure appreciate you.
I've grown to really appreciate his style of active moderation.
It would have been easy to start a new account, but I liked warring with dang at the time. I even emailed him a bunch appealing my, what I still believe is not really all that bad of a comment, but I accept why it got me in shit as a newer commenter. It spurred me to just try harder at contributing better.
Eventually, I was just randomly unbanned. Since then, i've come appreciate HN's moderation style.
There's really not many places on the internet with such lax account rules, yet mostly good conversation.
I appreciate the surprisingly wide range of topics and viewpoints generally allowed here. It does get a bit echo chambery, but mostly, any issue tends to get both sides heard as long as comments are written constructively.
Also, just learning about the purpose of this site helped. This is a news website, first and foremost, for people interested in funding from YC. It may have expanded since then, but the moderation does reflect the intended purpose of this site and just generally the kind of discourse expected from people interested in YC funding or other such things.
Thanks mods for all you do, that which we see and that we don't.
And yet its measure of quality is karma scores for the individual, not the content.
People tend to get carried away in a heat of discussion, but eventually return to the mean of civility after cool-down period.
Other places just impose ban frivolously, which doesn't help long term, bans destroy the community, methinks.
Moderate moderation like yours is the way to go, and I'm not saying it as a kiss ass.
Edit: dang, what moderation tools do you think could be helpful. What part of your job can be automated via ML/NLP?
What is your least favorite, repetitive or time consuming manual algorithm as a mod?
The UX for paginated threads is awful. I know you want to get rid of it, but I really hope you don't, because reading through something like the 4000 comment Biden thread as a single page would be incredibly taxing, and having to go through 'more' links to get to recent content is annoying.
Long threads do need to be paginated, but I think you should consider what other forums do and add a set of page links at the top and bottom of each page. It would be slightly more clutter but you wouldn't have to remind people that paginated threads are a thing every time it happens.
I think you have to stop following famous people like those guys, and instead follow up-and-coming economists and other scientists and bleeding edge researchers/builders, who are working hard to make a name for themselves with novel research in some interesting area.
Those are more likely to keep their Twitter feed focused on their research, rather than off-topic tweets, rants, political advocacy and "influencer" stuff people do once they become famous.
Also, the community of people who engage with them tend to be similarly focused, so you can find more high S:N folks to follow in their discussions.
If you curate your Twitter feed to just those types, you get a very high S:N ratio there.
So seriously, thanks dang. I think we've come to blows a few times, probably even not-so-kind ones, but whatever you're doing here works and you should probably keep doing it :)
Also, usually asking the moderators though email works as a way to get your questions answered.
Guess what N-gate talks about…
It also helps that you can only post like 5 times per 24 hour period. Helps me to not waste my quota on low value replies. It doesn’t look like everyone on the site is subject to that limit though—still trying to figure that one out... are there commenters with super powers that can ignore the 5/day limit?
On Twitter, I try hard do a better job moderating content by carefully selecting who to follow; however, much noise is unavoidable. (Twitter needs to rethink itself)
On the other door, this door, I ALWAYS end up in the right spots. This is the best site on the web, no doubt. Here I discover, I learn, I get inspired. I get downvoted too :)
Thanks mods!
"We thought you might like to know that we put [HN link] in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page sometime in the next 24 hours."
Another I got a few times in 2015 starts:
"[link] looks good, but didn't get much attention. Would you care to repost it? You can do so here: [link]."
Former might be a newer version of the latter, going by email dates.
I don't think I've read as many comments as I have on this thread and neither have I read every line of any other New York Times article as diligently!
Probably looking through the flagged comments is the least favorite, as well as most repetitive and time consuming manual activity, for all the mods who do it.
I do still have one optimistic belief about this, which is that groups have a kind of consciousness (call it culture) and that this can develop over time, and get more organized. To the extent that that happens, moderation is not needed so much. Moderation is there to try to provide the organization that the group can't do for itself, so it's always a substitute and not a very good one.
> Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.
> It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab#Trim_tab_as_a_metapho...
- - - -
And thank you!
And if this ML labeling is successful then do all the unflagging, or whatever is the most easily automated , most frequent action, to reduce the queue for manual processing.
Thanks Dang, I actually learned something from how you dealt calmly with a random internet poster.
Cheers, and bravo.
What kind of patterns can channel or harness all that escaping energy?
Also feels like there are too many escape valves on the internet and too few patterns to harness all the potential energy.
That kind of polarization does not just happen for no reason; people reach that frustration after repeatedly seeing themselves and others being downvoted anyway, no matter how flowery and sugared their dissent is.
Downvoters don't care how polite someone is, if they're saying something they don't want to be seen. It's a zero cost action for them, and easily lets them control what opinions other readers see about a topic.
Example: In every thread about browsers, if most people say they dislike Edge, anyone simply saying "Hey I like Edge, it's not so bad" gets downvoted.
So after a while that Edge user will be preemptively defensive the next time they voice their opinion, if they even feel like participating anymore.
HN is a place I spend a lot of time because the culture here is reasonable.
To me, saying "Hey I like Edge, it's not so bad" is pointless shit-stirring. It's looking to start trouble for no real reason.
It's a low value comment. The guidelines actively discourage that, so it's not surprising that it would be downvoted, having nothing to do with "disagreeing" per se.
If you have something meaty and thoughtful to say that disagrees with the majority view, the HN crowd will give you a fair shake. Jumping into the midst of a discussion where everyone is saying "This is junk!" to say "Well, I like it!" isn't thoughtful or meaty.
But HN wants to be different, with its quirky rules like not being allowed to downvote posts and replies, or needing a certain amount of karma to be able to downvote comments, and the time limits on edits etc., instead of just following the basic Reddit model.
So clearly someone at HN thought that a simple free-for-all system wasn't good enough, prone to abuse, and decided to make some changes, but HN isn't good enough either; it's still too easy for 3-4 downvoters to prevent thousands of people from seeing a comment they don't want to be seen.
It's too easy to suppress a side or view with fewer supporters here.
One thing HN should have borrowed is how some subreddits don't show a post/comment's score until N hours have passed.
If votes don't affect a comment's visibility for a while then everybody may have a chance to be heard. For more severe violations like spam or harassment, there's always the Flag button.
But one thing I keep thinking back to is the abysmal discussion of the Event Horizon Telescope black hole pictures. I think they were shown around the time of this interview. I remember for the first time the threads on hn felt unmoderated or overwhelmed [1]. Like someone sucked all the air out the room, metaphorically speaking. I don't mean this as a criticism of dan or anyone else behind hn (you can even see he was actively trying to flag the worst offenders), but I just wonder what it was like behind the scenes for hn that day, how prevalent that sort of thing is, how concerned mods should be of that sort of thing in the future, etc.
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?
> One of these years we'll release an update of it that incorporates a lot of the changes we've made to HN.
Out of curiosity, absent such a release, is there a public changelog anywhere? If not, that would be a great start.
The content isn't always enlightening, but most of it is, or at least intelligent and thought provoking.
Twitter is fine for following individuals, lwn.net for Linux specific stuff, even slashdot on occasion, although slashdot often ends up being a repeat of the stories that are here.
I've been doing the same (although I've actually been on a break from Twitter for over a year now). Care to share links to your lists?
BTW, it took me forever to realize that I didn't have to follow an account in order to put it in a list. I've been putting off a serious pruning (several thousand) of who I follow, and I wish there were better tools for doing that pruning.
I don't flag comments often, but I'll be even more careful now when I do if that's the case.
Suggestion: when flagging a comment, allow the flagger to state which guideline they think the comment violates (I believe both reddit and FB do this).
Thanks for verbalizing it. I didn't notice how remarkable this was before you said it.
The article showcased some of the more extreme comments out of what I've found to be, overall, a cornucopia of informative and thoughtful discourse.
This quote in particular was poignant and I think epitomizes a core value that makes this place special:
There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work. What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with individual users. That, case by case by case, seems to move the needle.
Flagging a comment takes extra work because you have to click through to the comment. I’ve never done that by accident and tried to only do it for comments that violate guidelines. Sometimes I subjectively feel a comment is trolling and will flag it. That’s not strictly against the guidelines and is a judgement call.
(The worst is when I accidentally hide a story. That’s way too easy to do and too hard to undo.)
It's a clever hack, alright, but dang if I didn't start to think I was going crazy, because something felt off with timestamps and surely the mods wouldn't be silently messing with those...
As for dang and his moderation, I appreciate very much his not-so-gentle nudging towards better conversation. I still fail frequently, but I try (and hope I am doing better). I had a particular ban that I got annoyed about because I thought the other guy deserved one too, but the real lesson was that it was about my response... and while it took a while, I took the correction to heart. Thanks dang for that, and for putting up with my more unothordox comments in a time when that is less and less tolerated.
Hyperbole is hyperbole, even if you like the message.
My biggest issue are the double standards.
This is useful in a time where taking some stance can cost you your job or career, even years down the line.
However, it's unfortunate that instead of showing up- and downvotes, negative-scored comments turn grey. There is no distinction between a universally disliked comment and a controversial comment.
I’m delighted to announce that Daniel Gackle (pronounced Gackley), who has already been doing most of the moderation for the last 18 months, is going to join YC full-time to be in charge of the HN community. Many HN users know Daniel as gruseom, though now he’s going to switch to the slightly more legit sounding dang.
https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac...
Anyhow, for dang and stcb (founder market fit!), I believe, with abuse in online communities on the rise, is an opportunity to dust up that YC application (stamp of approval!) and apply with a startup idea that can be repeatably (software eating the world!) sold to other companies grappling with this problem (product market fit!) unless they agree to a merger (acquihire by Stripe incoming!). Mark my words, this is going to happen someday.
Lispworks looks like exactly what I want, except it seems to be in the Delphi business model, thus I can't afford it.
DrRacket looks better... but it doesn't seem to be lisp?
I thank you for the lifeline. If only Borland had made TurboLisp back in the day.
I've had several submissions re-upped. I nominate others (via email) on occaision. '2nd chance nom', plus submission link.
Do NOT ask me to do this --- I base my recommendations on what strikes me as 1) credible content 2) that seems underappreciated. The submission queue ("new" link in top menue) is quite busy.
The issue with the former is that it relies on upvotes of people from the community. This leads to the problem of people upvoting comments on topics in which they lack expertise (ie developers upvoting comments about astronomy that "sound right")
This results in a trend (on HN and reddit) where the most upvoted comments are comments that "sound correct", but would not hold up against scrutiny of people who have expertise in that area. I like that HN censors the upvote count, so we are forced to judge the comment on its own merit.
E.g. if someone versed in cryptography upvotes or downvotes a cryptography story/comment, that counts for more than someone random
And I only care because the expertise gap is really the only flaw in HN/Reddit style ranking. In all other ways, it seems superior.
The New England Complex Systems Institute - https://necsi.edu/ (Twitter link at top right)
London Math Lab’s Ergodicity Economics group - https://ergodicityeconomics.com/ (Twitter feed in left column)
Any PI running a research project of interest to you at the Santa Fe Institute - https://www.santafe.edu/
Better links for navigating around large threads is on the todo list too...
Another option would be to clone the old submission into a new one, but then we get more dupes. And I don't know of any viable fourth option.
Reddit uses this order:
N comments | share | save | hide | give award | report | crosspost
N comments | N points by <user> <time> | hide | flag
I'm not sure that "flag" and "hide" need to be on the main page at all. You could show those only after clicking through to the submission?
(I should probably just switch to one of the many HN reader apps.)
Here's an example of one (healthcare) community that try them: https://q.health.org.uk/community/rcts/
> How does it work?
> Every member who signs up will be sent the name of another randomly-chosen member on the 1st of every month. Each pair can arrange a brief informal meet-up at a time that suits both parties – be it a phone call, Skype call, Google Hangout or even a coffee in person.
> “RCTs have given me the opportunity to talk to people who work in areas that I don’t usually come across in my day to day work.” Lesley Goodburn, Patient Experience Consultant
> RCTs allow Q members to connect with a new member each month and hear about what other colleagues are working on and share any ideas and inspiration. There are no rules here – RCTs should be viewed as an informal opportunity to connect with peers, however if scheduling means that you can’t meet that month then it’s ok.
> We think you’ll enjoy these fun and fruitful conversations – it’s organised serendipity. Matthew Mezey, Q’s Community Manager has written a blog about the benefits of RCTs.
And here's a link to that blog: https://q.health.org.uk/blog-post/easy-time-light-impact-hea...
Threads aren't linear - people don't read them from top to bottom like documents. Every subthread is a separate conversation which the reader may or may not be interested in, and having distinct pages makes discovery easier. Ask yourself why every other list page on the site is paginated? Why have only thirty stories listed on the front page? Why not just list every story ever posted, or every story this year, or the first thousand or hundred at a time?
And as far as "one can simply stop reading," ... yes... but this is a forum. It's primary purpose is to be read, not to demonstrate how quickly Arc can render HTML and send it up the pipe. That isn't even impressive. What is the value added by rendering a thread in a single page? How does that make the site better than pagination? What is the user getting in return for the loss in readability?
Would that not be viable?
I'll keep an eye out for one then.
On huge threads with like 1k comments, I do find that the high quality ones float to the surface (having more to do with stuff like hiding vote counts and restricting down vote access IMO). However, it's not hard to find people confidently talking out of their ass making it to the top of threads with even hundreds of comments. Look for people talking about something you are an expert in (or do a brief google search on a topic somebody is claiming expertise in, especially if it is related to ideology) and it isn't hard to spot. There are even all the bad cliche comments of the other platforms even if they aren't as simple as "have an upvote my friend" or "username checks out".
I find threads on politics and culture particularly unbearable here because it's the exact same chest beating and narratives that you will find on any other platform except that the posters possess the same self-rightousness and academic tone as if they were talking about mathematical fact and not a political opinion. Even more so, it often comes without the self-awareness to know that your opinions and arguments are most often being taken from whatever social media you frequent. Everybody is a "free thinker" here even though they spout off the exact same political arguments as everybody else in their clique. It makes some threads pretty toxic IMO because of how seriously everyone takes themselves. I'm of course making general claims to which there are exceptions, but this is something I've seen.
Thinking that you need to be super-intelligent to post on or browse HN is a bad meme. Take the guy below me that thinks jokes on HN "require higher levels of intelligence to parse". It's the same mentality that part of the Rick and Morty fan base gets made fun of for.
> there are other perspectives which are more important to me which I'm already missing out on
What perspectives are you thinking of?
The thread he referred to wasn't actually one I started. I made one comment in it. dang stated that "I'll try to give you more of a response later when I have time", but this never eventuated.
Incidentally, it was a very difficult time of my life, so I was genuinely reaching out to find out what I had done. His responses didn't help. I don't intend to comment further.
Edit: redacted a small part of this comment. It's unlikely to have been helpful, and it's unlikely the one I'm responding to would care.
I have no interest in the cultural warfare that supposedly educated ideologues seek to impose on society at large.
Women are by and large outside of the HN uni-silo, and I feel their absence keenly. The thousandth go-round on James Damore is going to play out very differently in a majority female community or a community with gender parity than it will in a mostly-male community like HN.
I don't imagine that the "powers that be" at HN wish for the community's gender skew. However, I don't think that you can counter the powerful forces at play in the wider tech industry without imposing controls on debate which you would find philosophically incompatible with HN's mission.
Always good to hear from you. I'm glad there's been progress; I wish the climb were not out of such a deep hole.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17777496 [2018]
> Yeah, that's why I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of HN
Do you think there's anything that HN's guides could do differently?
My ex husband had some terrific saying to the effect of "That's a When did you stop beating your wife? type question." And his point was that there is a deep assumption of guilt in the framing of some questions such that it's nearly impossible to answer them well at all and not somehow get trapped into agreeing that you are guilty.
Because if your knee jerk reaction is "I haven't stopped beating my wife....(because I've never been a wife beater)", before you can get to the "I've never beaten my wife" part of your thought process, the asker will go "So, you still beat your wife. I see." and won't let you rebut that. If you try to clarify, they will jump all over that as you changing your story or something and no matter what you say, they will return to their assumption of guilt and see every single answer as additional evidence of your guilt.
Your question here concerning women and HN implicitly assumes that the mods and/or the guidelines are somehow at fault and doing something wrong, and I don't think that's the case.
I hesitate to reply at all because part of the answer in my mind is that "It skewed more male when Paul Graham was the moderator. I think Dan Gackle does excellent work and he's made good headway on the issue in the years he has been here. It just takes time to turn the Titanic around as the saying goes."
And I don't like wanting to say that because I feel like then people will infer that I am accusing Paul Graham of something and that's not remotely my intent. It's like saying "I haven't stopped beating my wife....(because I never started beating my wife, damn it!)" and knowing everyone listening is going to go "Oh...so you really are pure evil. Thanks for clearing that up."
I don't think Paul Graham is somehow "to blame" for the forum skewing strongly male. YC itself has a good track record on diversity and my impression is that they are actually really quiet about that fact.
According to something Jessica Livingston wrote, Jessica and Paul were dating and they kept batting about ideas while some company was kind of stringing her along and not quite hiring her and Paul said one night "Let's start our own company." And within a day or two he contacted his two co-founders from Via Web and asked them to get on board and they agreed to do so, but only on a part-time basis (or so I understand).
So the company actually started out fifty-percent female on day one, though it didn't stay fifty-percent female for very long, and after a few years the other half of the two initial founders retired. So it's really much more of a woman-led company than I think gets generally recognized. I think Jessica Livingston is much more of a cornerstone of YC than the world thinks. The world thinks of YC as "Paul Graham's company," even though he stepped down several years ago from an active role in running it and Jessica is still there.
I know of a VC company that was founded explicitly to fund minority-led companies (women, people of color and LGBTQ founders) and the founder of that company has said she tells her people to not apply to YC because she has a poor opinion of them. Which I find bizarre because everything I see indicates YC has a lot of partners that are women, people of color and/or LGBTQ.
I'm currently going through Startup School and both the presenters in the videos are fairly frequently not cis het white males and the live audiences for these videos are quite diverse. A lot of people asking questions have thick accents.
So my general impression is that YC has a remarkably good track record on diversity that largely goes unrecognized and I don't think HN ended up skewing so starkly male due to sexism on Paul Graham's part. All the evidence suggests he, personally, has a good track record on treating women like equals and if he didn't YC wouldn't exist at all.
I wasn't here at the very beginning. I joined in July 2009 (under a different handle) and I was really sick at the time and it took a few years for me to realize that people here were talking at me like I was "prominent" for a female member and for me to go "What the hell?" and start trying to put together data of some sort privately just to figure out how to navigate HN better myself.
So I don't actually know how HN ended up skewing so strongly male to begin with (because I wasn't here to see how that went down) and I probably have no hope of figuring out how that came to be. But I have no reason to believe it's because YC or the moderators of HN or the guidelines for HN are somehow wrong and bad and sexist and excluding women.
I think it's probably more complicated than that and probably a lot of it boils down to something I think Dan Gackle once said to the effect of "When it's raining hard everywhere, it gets wet in here too."
In other words, sexism is everywhere. It's not like HN invented it. So I think it's unreasonable to implicitly assume HN is "doing something wrong" in that regard.
I have a pretty high opinion of HN overall. I think a better question would be "What is HN doing right that it's gotten better over the years given how rampant sexism is generally in the world?"
(Yes, I know, this isn't the answer most people expect given how much I bitch about sexism on HN at times. It impacts me. I need to try to make my life work.)
I'd say pinning stories and then pinning comments at the top urging civil discussion seems to work fairly well for a broad set of controversial topics, including gender-related hot-button issues.
However, there is still so much hostility and such a strong gender skew that you even if the comments obviously violating HN guidelines get flagged, the residual of borderline commentary is still overwhelming in the aggregate.
It's possible to do more. Consider the moderation strategies used by Jezebel and TheRoot, where comments either have to be posted by someone on a whitelist maintained by staff, approved by someone on the whitelist, or approved by the person being replied to if their comment was approved. That moderation system allows those sites to keep the hostility just barely at bay, and you will read perspectives playing out in long threads on those sites which would be instantly shouted down on HN.
The cost of the system used at Jezebel/TheRoot is that it reduces the scope for debate, since only approved commenters can disagree at will — an unapproved commenter replying in disagreement will usually be ignored. Still, I wonder whether some sort of whitelisting mechanism isn't the only way to allow to allow underrepresented perspectives to develop fully.
(For what it's worth, this would also apply to certain socially conservative perspectives which tend to have a short life on HN.)
I hope the mods of HN never go with such a system.
* The thought that HN might adopt Jezebel's moderation system.
* Whether sexism and racism will survive if Jezebel and TheRoot disappear.
Not sure how the veracity of my description of the thread (that’s some tortuous indirect speech!) is inaccurate.