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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Now might be a good time to add a suitably abstract and all-encompassing sentence to the guidelines about mentioning submissions, comments, and poll entries on other sites in the hopes of gathering support.

There are very few community management problems Wikipedia hasn't had to tackle, and, unsurprisingly, this is one of the earliest ones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing

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Might also want to figure out where YC stands on public vs. social media vs. direct message solicitation of votes. I was encouraged by one of the other finalists, via FB message, to vote for his startup, and that same founder also asked all his FB friends to vote. I don't personally mind it when it's someone I've known for decades (as this person was), but other contestants might.

I've also been e-mailed by strangers asking me to vote for their Show HNs on the /new page, and in one case was even approached "As an influencer [hah!], would you mind spreading buzz around our XYZ Startup that we'll be posting to Hacker News shortly." Usually I just respond to these with "You know there's a voting ring detector, right?", but it's not really clear what is or isn't acceptable from a HN community moderator's perspective.

They're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place here.

HN doesn't have a lot of resources to combat abuse (notice how much abuse prevention is just 'dang --- who runs all of HN --- personally writing corrective notices [they're not even the same notices! Dan, get a shortcut completer!]).

I think a pretty big part of their strategy is to wait for serial abusers to do something stupid and then penalize their accounts. It's an arms race. If they list all the things you can do to get a submission penalized, they're making it harder to catch serious abusers.

I suspect that writing the corrective notices is cathartic for Dan.

Oh God no, and if any catharsis works its way in there I excise it posthaste. But I think there is value in writing each one individually and varying them as much as possible (which isn't always very much).

I do use a shortcut completer—personally recommended by tptacek as it turns out—for some things, but more on the email side.

How is it even possible that there aren't just buttons next to every comment in the admin UI that you can click to detach a comment and apply an incivility warning?

We have software to detach the comments and do mechanical things like that, but finding ways to vary the message about civility seems important to me, so I force myself to do those by hand. Sometimes I throw in variations to counter tedium, even with the idea that it might have entertainment value... though that is dangerously easy to overdo.

There's a design point here too. After two years, these comments have shown themselves to be partly formulaic and the sort of thing that could benefit from software support. I'd like that software support to be something available to users, not just moderators. If there were a way for users to convey to each other that a comment could be edited to better follow the guidelines, that'd be great, because we (actually just I in this respect, since I'm the only one currently posting moderation comments) would no longer be the bottleneck. The long-term vision for HN is to make it a self-regulating system.

and if any catharsis works its way in there I excise it posthaste

original poster meant that writing these posts are cathartic for you because they let you "untangle the knots" in this situation. he is referring to your (commonly believed) good-hearted nature and how it must be relieving for you to set things right.

he didn't mean that you are using these posts to let off some steam, as you have perceived it.

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