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Comment by omegaworks | Hacker News Reader

Lost me at

>face it, progressives, Elizabeth Warren is a pipedream, not a possibility

That extra knee in the back after Politico's absurd torrent of Bernie Sanders hatecoverage is just plain unnecessary.

It was a dumb bit of trolling, but I think it's time for us to learn as a community how not to react to these bits, since doing so invariably makes the discussion worse.

Indeed. At a more meta level, it makes you wonder what are they thinking, still antagonizing Sanders supporters that way. You'd think they would try to move to a more conciliatory discourse at this point, in order to get those voters in November.

Objectively speaking, it's not just dumb but could possibly affect the election.

The article is from April 2015. And they were quite correct – Warren did not declare her candidacy (or even come close to doing so).

Thanks, added the year!

I look forward to someone discovering a line of discourse that'll de-antagonize the legions of Sanders supporters writing hateful comments across the internet. It is truly sick.

It goes both ways, really. I have a suspicion there's a lot of trolling against both coming from third parties though (read: the Trump troll brigade.)

Agreed. But I also think that as one of the admins you should refrain from explicit judgement on comments and leave that to the community.

HN is not community-driven in the same way that Reddit or 4chan are. I come here for that reason. I want HN moderators to tell people when they're straying from what they want HN to be. I wish more discussion-oriented sites were like that. It makes it feel a little more like a moderated mailing list. I usually agree with the moderation, but if I didn't I'd just go elsewhere, and I wouldn't hold it against the moderators here. There's nothing wrong with people preferring more democratic moderation (or none at all), and there's nothing wrong with other people preferring more opinionated and direct moderation.

I appreciate sites like Reddit that are way more hands-off, and that try to give the community tools to be more or less self-moderating. But I also appreciate sites like HN which are driven by a (relatively) small number of people who just want to run a particular type of site with a particular type of community and enforce a particular level of discourse. There probably wouldn't even be an HN if this wasn't the case. There's no reason both approaches can't coexist on the Internet, and users can choose the sites with moderation philosophies that best suit them.

To add to mwfunk's fine comment, one of the lessons I draw from HN is that interesting things emerge when you have more complex feedback loops between community and moderation. Entirely unregulated discourse seems to trend to extreme states that turn out to be boring and ultimately turn into a desert, at least for a site whose guiding value is intellectual curiosity. We knew about some of this when pg started HN—that's why its original prospectus talked about trying to avoid the typical fate of online communities—and we've learned a lot more over the years.

The key, of course, is to stay within an optimal range of moderation. One wants enough to avoid the perils of unsupervised discourse, and then stop. Do we get the balance right? Hard (and not) for me to say, but one thing I'm sure of is that we're not interested in controlling this place, only helping it be as interesting as it can.

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