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...
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.
- 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.
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.
#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.
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.
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.
Better links for navigating around large threads is on the todo list too...
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?
> there are other perspectives which are more important to me which I'm already missing out on
What perspectives are you thinking of?
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.