Analyzing HN moderation and censorship
drewdevault.com
drewdevault.com
As for comment moderation, I think that HN is a community with the least amount of moderation i've seen. Which makes me really happy.
I have submitted only three or four things here, so I don't really know how nice (or not nice) is HN from the submitters' point of view.
The Reddit mods and admins are notoriously censorious. If you want minimal moderation, you would need to go to the anonymous imageboards. The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many.
Hence, the effect of 4chan on the Internet — its top posters are the edge of the troll evolution.
Could you provide some examples of how the content is better there? I'd be interested, but any time I've ever tried to investigate, I can't get past all the unfettered crap
I personally appreciate 4chan for generally weighing the value of a particular post on its own merits rather than any sort of user history or whatever - it's a good counter-balance to places like HN or Reddit where comments can get buried or removed if they go against the hive mind and there's no post history to dig through. I definitely get how the trade-off of inflammatory posts being more common isn't as palatable to some people, though, so it's kind of a mixed bag on if you'll get anything out of it or not. Opinions, etc.
This is a very double edged sword, especially when advice is being given. Being able to anonymously down-vote BS rather than explaining one's objection creates a positive feedback loop.
Someone will ask about something, subjects that are not mainstream enough for many people to know but are still common enough for many people to have exposure to are particularly dangerous. Reddit's design amplifies even the slightest majority opinion to where it looks like a near unanimously held opinion. If the first ten people on the scene are laymen who just up-vote whatever the relevant old wives tail or urban legend is then an actual SME who comes along saying "but you're wrong, it doesn't actually work like that" they often get down-voted to oblivion.
People tend to Google it when they see conflicting opinions so what the first page of Google says is highly relevant. Now, for a semi-mainstream topic information on the general case is far more accessible than the specific case. The result is a lot of advice that is terrible for the specific situation but good in general gets tossed around like it's gospel.
Reddit doesn't self police. The appearance of consensus where there isn't one creates the illusion of everyone stepping in line because any non-majority (majority local to the sub) opinion is negative-weighted.
Edit: realized you were talking about HN users, my comment about Reddit still stands.
Question for the mods: Why? It doesn't appear to be a bias towards either side. Is the perception just that people are tied of hearing about it? Why not let the users decide that?
Even on a hot-button topic, there are quality comments made, by both sides. Those are worth reading, no matter which side you take on the issue. And then there are the "You're so stupid, how could you think something so idiotic, I hope you die in a fire" comments. Those comments don't add much except noise. If you want the quality comments to be visible among the noise, you need to weed out the noise comments. You need this more on hot-button topics, because they attract more noise comments.
It's possible to moderate a discussion forum to avoid this, but it requires a high level of involvement from the moderators and a willingness to aggressively recognize and prune divisive commentary regardless of the specific tone or content.
Sez you. The unspoken premise is that nothing is so important that it's worth stopping to have an argument over. Perhaps I'm misreading your views, but when they're tossed out as an aphorism they come off as smug rather than substantive.
For example when parents have a disagreement about how to deal with catching their child sneaking in drunk after a party.
This can go many ways but for the purpose of highlighting the difference take Chris and Pat.
(argument)
Chris: Pat, I can understand how you'd feel that way, but considering the family history of alcoholism, maybe we should take a more conservative approach with this.
vs
(flame war)
Chris: Well, Pat... Maybe if your mother had cared half as much about you and your brother growing up as I'm trying to care about our kids and cracked down on you guys a little bit, maybe your brother would have stopped at that red light, and maybe your kids would have an Uncle.
Outside of flagging, behavior within the post itself (lots of comments?) probably penalize them. Really, really good stuff makes the frontpage, though. The issues at Uber, for example, were widely discussed.
What I mean is if you read the comments on an article about James Damore the day it broke and read the comments were the article to be posted today, they haven't really evolved. It's the same canards over and over. Damore being an example of a story that users were indignant about getting knocked off the frontpage.
After all, for some of these topics it's exactly the people that won't go looking for them at other places on the internet where they may still make a difference.
To use an example that's slightly less controversial: I think it's important for people working with lots of other people's data to have some fundamental sense of privacy rights. And HN is probably one of the best places to reach those actually in the trenches that are in the position to say 'no' when, for example, the CEO of Yahoo tells them to allow the NSA full access to their users' emails.
Yet that's a topic that quickly turns to politics, so you'd probably have good reasons to wish those discussions happened elsewhere.
Just to be clear: I think the mix of topics overall is mostly fine right now. But just like Facebook or Twitter, I think HN may be in a position where your "editorial responsibility" should be somewhere on your radar. Not because HN is the size of those, but because it caters to a readership that has certain powers far outstripping its size.
edit: not sure why this is getting downvotes when it's a direct counterargument/response to the parent
See, for example, this very article calling out the moderation of a submission on anti-white racism in the restaurant industry, while there are probably dozens of stories buried each week exploring racism or sexism on the tech sector. Yes, some of those do make it to the front page. But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem> you need about a thousand female Uber employees invited to a strip club for every alt-right Googler that gets fired for writing the wrong memo.
It's also interesting to watch the insistence on "engaging with others' arguments" when it comes to literal mobs with torches calling for the next holocaust, yet the overall treatment of these hot-button issues on HN is far to the right compared even to conservative outlets like the WSJ.
Pretty sure that's not true. IMO you're falling into the cognitive bias we all seem to have, of seeing the community as dominated by your ideological opposite. The other side sees it just the other way. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15388778, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915, and lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....
> But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem>
We can't use such a metric. The magnitude of those problems is so large that there would be nothing else on the front page if we did.
HN is trying to be a specific kind of site—one that gratifies intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I think it's ok for such a place to exist on the web, don't you? If so, many things follow. The site can't primarily be about litigating disputes or fighting for causes, even (especially) good causes. In fact it can't 'primarily' be about anything, because curiosity shrivels under repetition. Therefore HN's system (community + mods + software) is organized not to have too much, i.e. very much, of anything on the front page.
The issue isn't that HN suppresses discussion of e.g. sexism/gender in tech; it doesn't—there have been tons of threads, often large, often on the front page. The issue is that <front page time>/<how much I care about X> is always, for any X, less than you would like. For most casual observers, "less than I would like" feels like "censored completely". Meanwhile the readers who don't like X have the mirror-image view and say "HN is overrun with X". It's all an undergraduate psych experiment basically.
For an article a about work and unrelated to sexism, gender or racism, a commenter wrote out of the blue that all white men live privileged and easy lives. A second person replied and disagreed, arguing that some men don't have everything perfect and easy from the point of birth to death. The reply got moderated for causing a flame war, with third-party people asking dang why he targeted the dissenting view and not the original comment.
Even if you're right, I'm not sure what evidence it's supposed to count as; everybody knows we make bad calls, and I know it better than anyone. But I searched for your incident and could only find https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530877, which is close to what you describe and (I think) would strike most HN readers as pretty defensible.
The point is that if there is a bias, it would be that moderation seems to target those that disagree when people bring up sexism and racism in unrelated article discussions. It seems very safe, even profitable in terms of votes to bring up sexism and racism, which would be contrary to the views of matt4077.
I predict that if moderation was a bit more consistent in keeping out discussion about sexism and racism in unrelated articles (unless exceptional new insight), we would actually see less reader fatigue and lower amount of flagging for explicit articles about sexism and racism.
(Just to be extra clear, I don't disagree with the moderation itself on the two above examples if they had been the ones bringing in the topic of sexism into those threads).
These calls are somewhat arbitrary because when a thread degenerates, you can always trace the root of the degeneration further upthread. But moderation is more like pruning a tree than excising a tumor. The goal isn't to get rid of all malignancy—that would be too draconian and is impossible anyway. It's to detach the bulk of unwanted growth.
People can reasonably differ about individual cases, but the principle here ought to be pretty solid for anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and wants to use the site as intended.
I just think that's breaking-expectations-bias: "Man bites dog" stories get more attention than "Dog bites man", because the community expects the latter and doesn't see it as newsworthy.
> yet the overall treatment of these hot-button issues on HN is far to the right compared even to conservative outlets like the WSJ.
No, its not. (Its true that it contains content that is to the right of what you'd usually see in the WSJ, but it also contains content very far to the left of what you'd find in the WSJ; on balance, it is very much not to the right of the WSJ, though it might well be to the libertarian side of the WSJ.)
Moreover, there's evidence that repeating such generalizations—even though you intend them critically—makes the environment less welcoming and poisons it further for the equality you'd presumably like to see.
When you do this, you (i.e. we—we nearly all do it) are valuing the rush of morally posturing above our peers more than the cause we care about. If we're going to actually make HN be the welcoming place we want it to be, we'll have to do something about this.
I have my doubts about how welcoming HN is for different demographics, and while the grandparent poster is handwaving things with a mental mockup as you say, absent transparency on moderation policies many people inevitably feel the same way about the moderation.
I mean, at present you have a bunch of secret rules to make everything run better. That works OK as a practical strategy, but it also reduces buy-in - which is why I get heavily downvoted any time I suggest that government intelligence services are inevitably going to adopt utility-maximizing strategies at the expense of liberty, no matter how many times I qualify this by saying I'm trying to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.
I think there's merit to the suggestion that snarking about how unwelcoming HN is to industry minorities is counterproductive. But I don't think HN's institutional commitment to being more welcoming to industry minorities is exactly pellucid.
Personally, I don't feel any need to know how many women are on the moderating staff. That question has not ever crossed my mind as an issue for me, personally, as a woman posting here.
My impression is that the forum is fairly multicultural. It is not a monolith of white American males/white American male culture.
I am much more concerned with feeling heard than with whether or not they have firsthand experiences like mine. I once wrote the mods and made my case for why something should be deleted as I felt it was actively putting a young woman in real danger. They didn't initially see it, but they did listen and ultimately redacted the information that concerned me.
I think if I have a real problem, they will listen. This is better in my mind than having been born with the same bits between their legs that I happen to have been born with.
I don't pretend to speak for all minorities. But my understanding is that both you and anigbrowl are white males. So I thought I would chime in just so the topic isn't being addressed solely by the demographic that you two express concerns about dominating the mod staff.
This is an insidious pattern that I see a lot. White men virtue signal about their concerns about sexism, racism, etc, then fail to give real weight to the voices of the very people they claim to be concerned about. The concerns of white males matter and should be heard. The voices of oppressed minorities still are irrelevant, even when the topic is the concern of fair treatment for them.
This makes an excellent point, and the same could be said of the junior moderation team - the HN readers who up/downvote comments.
A practical solution: The mods might ask people in underrepresented minorities for some honest, frank perceptive and feedback. Stop guessing and trying, and get some real knowledge. Look at particular threads (on sexism, etc.) and talk about how welcoming HN is to them and why. IME, there is no substitute for a lifetime of personal experience with these issues; most people without that experience - including myself - are surprised when they hear the realities and details.
You can identify who is underrepresented and who might feel unwelcome by what groups are referred to as "they". For example, in discussions of sexism women are often discussed in the third person - a good sign of who is the excluded group. If you think about it, those discussions should be led by the people who have experience with the issue, just like Java devs (hopefully) lead the Java discussion. This discussion, right here and right now, should have those voices - it's right in front of our eyes.
I'll add that religious prejudice against Muslims is particularly overlooked. If I were Muslim, I would not feel welcome here at all. As a practical test, substitute in 'Jews/Jewish/Judiasm' for 'Muslims/Islamic/Islam' (to pick a religious minority against which prejudice is rejected, as it should be for all) and evaluate the statement. I've seen many that unambiguously fail.
What makes you think we don't?
Gimme a break; I'm writing Internet comments not dissertations. Some things slip through the cracks. :)
EDIT: Also, re-reading my comment, I see it's all pretty critical. HN is the best forum on the Internet, IMHO, in large part thanks to the guidelines and moderation; but at the same time the competition is pretty bad and I think HN can be even better. My hope is that by developing and demonstrating effective practices, and then by sharing them, HN could improve discourse throughout the web. It sounds fantastical, but why not - the practices cost nothing, websites and online services everywhere are starving for a solution, and HN is in a very visible position and has a technically sophisticated team, a backing organization that loves innovation (YC), and an audience that can appreciate it.
The situation is definitely complex, which is why it must be discussed at every opportunity and in every venue, especially by intelligent people who deal with complexity as a living (HN's core demographic). Downvoting and flagging stuff just because you personally don't want to talk about it is selfish. It is in fact the very definition of selfishness.
If someone does not want to discuss a particular topic, they can refrain from upvoting it and posting comments on its discussion thread. FLAGGING however prevents others from being exposed to it as well because it pushes the submission off the front page (where it rightfully belongs, based on votes) and sometimes even kills it if enough selfish people pile on. That only makes the issue worse because it is akin to mopping it under the carpet.
You may feel that discussions on certain topics don't add anything original. Did it ever occur to you that that's simply your perspective, shared perhaps only (or mostly) by other old-timers? Many people, especially those new to the industry, are unaware of these issues and they should be exposed to them within the relatively civil and intelligent medium of HN.
I strongly suspect that many users flag based on the title, without reading further. Most of the sexism focused pieces are pretty bad. I'm a woman and I tend to hate most of them.
Once or twice, I emailed the mods when I felt a post on the subject was poorly titled, but had worthwhile content. On at least one occasion, they changed the title and, I think, turned off flags for the piece so it could be seen.
I am careful to have a light hand. I seem to be the most prominent female member here and I can get accused of having an agenda for saying anything at all on the topic of sexism. *
I have tried to write more evenhanded pieces on one of my blogs. Some of those have gone okay, but they never really get all that much traffic or response on HN. But, as I see it, some of the problems with this topic include:
1) It has a long track record of ugliness on both sides, so some people kneejerk flag anything that sounds like it touches on the topic because they are tired of these toxic, pointless discussions.
2) Most pieces are pretty man-bashing. The audience here is predominantly male. They get tired of being hated on for having been born male. (I am also tired of the misandry, so I don't think that is unreasonable.)
3) Most pieces on the topic aren't really all that good. They are typically histrionic and blamey.
4) If you don't use the usual catch phrases in the title, people won't recognize that it is pertinent to a topic they are interested in. If you do, you can't sidestep all the baggage it involves. So trying to do something better faces a huge uphill battle in terms of even being recognized as both relevant and not guilty of the usual issues.
Reddit was like this almost 10 years ago. This is the bliss of obscurity. We should hold a wake for Reddit 2010.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit,h... (though I doubt people coming to this site actually google it)
Supposedly if you find the right subreddits it gets better, but since I have HN I haven't bothered. Nothing lasts forever - I wonder how long before HN goes the way of slashdot and reddit.
Are you posting via proxies?
Some of the most heavy-handed moderation I've seen lately has been on some subreddits.
None of that controversy in my safe space either.
I submit a lot (although not nearly as much as some others) and I have no idea of what submission will be good or not.
Some things I think are good don't take off, and get put in the second chance queue. Other things I think are good don't get put in that queue, and I don't know why.
A shoutout to `minimaxir for being one of the only people constantly calling out others for such bs. As you can imagine, people get offended for being called out and I remember at least 2 instances of him being treated rudely for doing so on twitter.
If anyone comes across such submissions, please report them to the mods by sending them an email. I'll admit I have not been doing what I suggested, but going forward I will.
At the risk of being hypocritical, I do have a problem with the opposite: coded messages to followers to flag en masse a post for basically any reason. The effects of flagging en masse vs. voting en masse are exaggerated as the data in the article illustrates. An optional email to moderators expressing the concern plus one personal flag is the appropriate response there, imo.
The policing of verbiage is so hard. If I posted the exact same thing to my followers that some paid influencer did, the effect would me markedly different. I would likely get 0-2 votes from my post, because I have real world friends as followers few of whom have accounts here. My point is that the same words used by different people can have very different implied meaning and outcomes.
It just doesn't make sense to me to judge a post on the words used(1) instead of looking at the voting patterns. For example, what if someone not involved with the project just loves it and spontaneously posts about it? Should the project creators be punished for that independent act? I'd say, yes, but only if it looks like a vote ring.
(1) You could make an exception for blatant vote begging, but even that would be caught by a good vote ring algorithm.
In any case, you have to look at the whole thing as a system. If you allow people to point to their HN submissions on Twitter, the site will be unduly influenced by Twitter, rather than by the community that actually uses and contributes to the site. It's not a matter of intention --- I'm annoyed too that I can't casually link to things from Twitter! --- but of empirical fact.
If it hits #1 on the front page after a bit of time, sure, humblebrag away on Twitter.
That last bit is the critical one. Vote solicitation that doesn't go anywhere is an annoyance, but fake upvotes getting otherwise lame content on the front page is a threat. If you (or anyone) see cases of this, I wish you would send them to hn@ycombinator.com. We investigate, and can usually figure something out one way or the other.
From my perspective—but of course we don't see everything—HN's anti-voting-ring software is now so strict that the main thing we have to do is turn it off when a submission is good enough. It's not uncommon for there to be a high-quality project that someone has put months or years into, and then naively tries to promote on HN (edit: I mean by asking friends to upvote). Often people think that's what they're supposed to do. (If you think the opposite should be obvious, try communicating anything to a large-enough audience. The vast majority never get the message.) If we didn't override the voting ring detector in such cases, some really good work would be lost to the audience here, which wouldn't benefit HN. Of course this is rare enough; most ring-voted submissions aren't very good. But years of working on this problem have taught me that the best voting ring detector would not be one that penalizes submissions; it would just turn all ring-votes into no-ops.
I recall a discussion here many many years ago where we agreed that we wanted that- it was a cool part of the site. I didn't realize it changed.
Edit: my comment upthread was unclear so I added a bit.
By 'naively tries to promote on HN' I mean things like asking friends to upvote and passing links around on Twitter. Those tactics don't work (or at least as far as I know they don't) and usually hurt the submission rather than help it. Does that make sense?
I agree it (along with other moderation behaviors described in the article) should be documented more explicitly in the guidelines/FAQ
When google released its page-rank algorithm it became a target for manipulation and entire forums got wrecked (until nofollow) with the wave of consequences it created.
I think the threat of user manipulation will always outweigh that of mod manipulation. Worth considering.
There's no master plan behind it all, but each of these ways of handling policy has a purpose. Describing evolving policy in comments allows the moderators to be responsive and flexible without overrunning the site with metadiscussion like they would if every new decision they made was accompanied by a formal change in the guidelines. Relating policy in email discussion gives them a chance to explain it in context and to take feedback from the people most impacted or interested in that policy --- we all know votes on this site wouldn't generate that set of users.
The stuff they don't make public is generally stuff we don't want made public. We forget that there are just a couple (I think literally) people running this site, and they're up against waves of people trying to create schemes to sell front page rank to spammers. They've got a sort of equilibrium that gives them a chance --- something Reddit seems to be failing at despite a much large team --- while still having the time to type out individualized contextualized explanations for all their routine moderating actions on threads (seriously, mods, figure out TextExpander or build something like it into your moderating tools).
It strikes me it's always worth holding that this is a subdomain of YCombinator and presumably is used to further that corporation, its controllers ideals, and its associates interests over others who might seek influence here.
There are things (e.g. changed titles) were I wish their specific action would be visible to avoid confusion (they often leave comments, but not always and they are easy to miss). That'd be more useful than a list entry somewhere "mods can change submission titles".
People often don't seem to know about flags and vouch, these tools for users could be better explained somewhere. (Not that it will stop those crying "moderators censoring $thing!" every time a controversial topic is flagged)
I like it this way. They have excellent taste. The community has repeatedly proven it cannot be trusted to upvote intellectually gratifying content. pg's original HN code contained a flag for "rally", meaning the story is a rallying cry, and is therefore penalized because it's so easy to mindlessly upvote it.
The results speak for themselves: HN is now almost a top-1000 site by traffic.
They had to be phenomenal. I don't think many people appreciate just how difficult this was to pull off, or how much they work their asses off every single day. If they ignored HN for even a week, it would deteriorate noticeably.
Yet technology is at least as important. The fact that our upvotes do matter makes the situation unique -- although the mods can determine the relative weights of stories, we can still push a story upwards if enough of us are interested, and the story fits the site's original goal of gratifying intellectual curiosity.
There is no company anywhere in the world like this. At this point, HN practically defines our culture. When news stories say things like "so-and-so story about <technology> has been making the rounds on social media," at least some of them are talking about HN now. And your coworkers probably hear about the tech they use at least partly from HN.
The sole reason they're in this position is because they deserve to be. I hope they stay selective. As to being secretive, we should let them choose. If they want to reveal, fine. If not, fine. They've earned it. Even still, they've been remarkably transparent.
The freedom to take other people's private belongings and repurpose them to your own ends is no real kind of freedom at all. But that's ultimately what you're yearning for when you allude to the Empire of Napoleon.
There are reasons people continue to frequent HN as a news aggregator and comment on the site: it has some uses and benefits to them. 'sillysaurus3 does list a number of reasons supporting their position. If they're expressing a bit more joy and appreciation for your taste, dismissing that as "slobbering" seems quite harsh and unnecessary. Phrasing it as "pro-moderation" in an arguably pejorative manner likewise derails. A quality site, one I find personally valuable, requires moderation. If I'm in favor of a particular site and value its moderation efforts, I'm going to be "pro-moderation". If I actually find it valuable, enjoyable, and a benefit, I'm going to be appreciative, and maybe at times effusive. Have I lost objectivity in such a case? I'd like to think we're more human than that.
Diff that vs HN circa 2008: https://github.com/evanrmurphy/SweetScript/blob/master/arc3....
Lamernews seems like just another HN clone, but back when it was launched it was a serious attempt at being a competitor. They probably came closest to pulling away a significant chunk of HN. I started to use it.
Then I ran into missing features. Little quality of life stuff. I forget what they were, but the whole site felt noticeably harder to use. So I stopped using it.
It's so tempting to think "HN is so simple. Just throw Rails at the problem and you can wipe the floor with them." But Lamernews was 2,964 lines of Ruby, and only managed to contain about 60% of the features. news.arc is 2,616 lines. And I don't care what anybody says: if you sat down and forced yourself to read that code for a week straight, you'd find it is actually quite readable. It's terse because it's for getting shit done.
And it all worked! No data loss, no massive security problem, and the last time HN was down for >24h was because pg manually edited the database and accidentally created a circular comment chain.
One way to look at the situation is that pg's original vision for arc failed. Arc was supposed to be what Clojure turned out to be. But even though HN alone is the one significant Arc project, what a project! The world was made materially better thanks to it. And I don't think they could've pulled off HN in some other language. There was too much work for one person to do to be distracted by the thousands of details a modern webdev needs to stay on top of.
I think it's possible to do the same thing for modern webdev. Arc's goal was to be a reliable foundation for building webapps. It comes with a user+admin system out of the box, for example. Every Arc app does.
I've been playing around with hooking up AngularJS to it, because unlike React or Angular, AngularJS can operate purely in HTML. You normally never want to do that -- usually you want to set up controllers and such. But when you control the language, you end up being able to give it the Babel treatment: the output looks complex, but you get all the features of a modern frontend site. Initial experiments were quite promising.
And from there, it's easy to just emit JSX instead. React? Angular? Sure, whatever. It's treated as compiler output.
(Indirect sourcemaps are funny... JSX compiles to minified JS, whose sourcemap points back to the JSX. But if Arc spits out JSX, you'll want a sourcemap from JSX -> Arc as well. It's sourcemaps all the way down.)
Here's how it works. Everything is loaded into memory at startup. You can think of it like a bigass JSON tree. Anytime you change the tree, write the whole thing out to disk. Since all the data is loaded from file "foo", and you write out to "foo.tmp" followed by `mv foo.tmp foo`, there is no risk of data loss, ever.
So what about sharding? Well, yeah, that's a problem. But it's not a problem that HN had to deal with. You can see how effective it was to throw a single 64GB RAM monster at the problem rather than a cluster of servers. The moment they hooked up Cloudflare to HN, they got all the same benefits a big cluster would provide anyway.
People can be prejudiced against this simplicity all they want, but it's hard to argue with results. You don't even need to know SQL to start using it.
"But migrations --" well, Arc makes it super easy to define a "template", which is just a set of fields, and each field is whatever you want them to be.
https://github.com/evanrmurphy/SweetScript/blob/6b4ed26acc9c...
(deftem item
id nil
type nil
by nil
ip nil
time (seconds)
url nil
title nil
text nil
votes nil ; elts each (time ip user type score)
score 0
sockvotes 0
flags nil
dead nil
deleted nil
parts nil
parent nil
kids nil
keys nil)
It's sort of similar to mongoose record definitions.
But look, HN is proof positive that this system can work and can scale to a top-1000 website. 99% of webapps won't even come close to those performance requirements. And when you do approach them, you can find ways to make it scale.
My main focus has been updating Arc to run on JS, and to add keyword arguments. That way you'll be able to use the whole JS ecosystem too.
Jokes aside, I refuse to let Arc die. There were genuinely good ideas embedded in it, amidst the rough edges. People just never forced themselves to use it. It's like if Vim was invented but had no documentation, so no one ever realized it's powerful if you embrace it.
But yeah, I imagine my version will have a different name and a shiny website. Being a decade out of date does matter, especially for hiring purposes.
As far as I can tell, the arc forums site is still up and running, and a lot of people seem to be focused on Anarki[0].
That's... just a struct or a map in any other language. Convenient but not necessarily a point in Arc's favor per se.
>So yes, theoretically if you wanted to rename "kids" to "children", you're gonna have to process all the old data. But 1. then don't do that, and 2. even still, it's not hard to do that anyway.
It's still an argument against using flat-files. Updating a site with a proper database isn't typically tied to disk read/write speeds - at best renaming "kids" to "children" means changing a field in a model and maybe a template - and that's a fixed amount of work regardless of the number of records you have.
>My main focus has been updating Arc to run on JS, and to add keyword arguments. That way you'll be able to use the whole JS ecosystem too.
You mean Node/NPM on the backend? That might be interesting. I'm not familiar enough with Arc to know (I've only played with Anarki a bit, but I have too many random projects on my plate as it is) but does it even have dependency management?
EDIT: Actually, you may be right. They already forward data to Firebase, which means they could just store the data in Firebase directly. Firebase is pretty great, so it's possible they did this.
One bit of supporting evidence: there seems to be no startup time. Loading GBs of data from disk takes a little while, so restarting HN would be painful. We'd notice it as ~30 seconds of downtime. Especially now that HN has grown so large. I haven't noticed this in a couple years (but I'm not omnipresent).
So it could go either way, and there are a lot of advantages to the Firebase approach.
I guess I take back everything I said. But only because a lightweight alternative exists, not because flat files are inherently bad.
Forums written in other languages do as well - and any decent framework can just include user management as a dependency. To me it doesn't seem like an unqualified good idea for Arc to bake all of that into the language or the default app.
Bam, you get CRUD for free, you get special superpowers if you're logged in as an admin, and you can put in access controls so that other people can log in as other types of users and see a subset of the data. I dunno, it's pretty great. You even get a REPL at /repl in case you need to hop on and run some code on production. (If something seems amiss, rather than bother with grepping logfiles, you'd head to /repl and start asking questions about the current state of the app. This tends to be a lot faster.)
Just depends what you're looking for.
I like Lobsters a lot, and I like a lot about what they do differently than HN, but we shouldn't pretend that it's something it isn't.
There are probably a bunch of people behind the scenes, and they deserve lots of credit too. But there is something incredible about being able to post a dozen moderation comments every day for years without ever being so mistaken as to provoke community backlash. It would be really easy for them to offer an offhand opinion, or just make a bad call, and suddenly have people up in arms about it.
They're also some of the most humble people. Both of them have done some really amazing work and have cool hobbies. But I've sort of had to pry that info out of them over years.
http://github.com/gruseom/numen - Dan's project. JS REPL for emacs. It took another four years for anyone to even come close (https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium) as far as I know.
https://github.com/sctb/lumen - Scott's project. A self-hosted Lisp that compiles and runs in both JS and Lua. The whole codebase recompiles in about one second flat when using LuaJIT.
But like, that's maybe 5% of the cool stuff they've done. There's just no outward sign -- they don't bother with blog posts or any kind of self-promotion.
So yes, all hail the kings of lisp.
I have some qualms about some systematic things, but it's a broad philosophical dispute and not the running of HN. In governance - there is no way to 'win' anyway.
I wish every leader had to be a forum moderator of very different groups of people, but we seem to select for whatever the opposite of that is no matter the political predilection.
Indeed this is cool.
To compile on BSD, I used
gcc -static -std=c89 -Wall -pedantic -o woe woe.c -lmEdit: fixed, thanks!
> We thought you might like to know that we put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14522178 in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page sometime in the next 24 hours.
> This is part of an experiment in giving good HN submissions multiple chances at the front page. If you're curious, you can read about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and other links there. And if you don't want these emails, sorry! Tell us and we won't do it again.
I wonder if it is a full time job. Do other sites have full time moderators?
Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like data entry jobs in the past.
To compare and contrast, if you are a construction worker making residential housing, you and see its effect on people and humanity. Year after year and perhaps decade after decade you can drive by and know your work helped a family. Yet the effort of a moderator goes away within hours and is hard (for me) to see the long lasting value.
This write up helped me think about a topic i never thought of before. Thanks
(HN moderators: i know u make this site a good read. Thanks)
Tell HN: New features and a moderator | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 (Jul 2016, 451 comments)
I'm one of the moderators over on reddit.com/r/AskEngineers.
It is work... that I don't get paid for. Or any kind of reward, really.
But I'm doing it because I want to promote high-quality discussion on various engineering topics. I'm glad when we can help each other out by answering questions.
To be a moderator, ideally you're in it for the long term, by trying to guide your community in a good direction, educate people, uphold standards of good and civil discussion.
I'm usually checking the new queue and moderation queue a couple times per day.
It's good to have multiple active moderators, who are in different timezones to provide better 24/7 coverage.
Others have pointed out that if you want more discussion on X, you can go find it elsewhere. The point is that I want to see what HNers think about X — which is why I think a tool like this would be useful.
Btw since you brought up the point, we moderate stories less, not more, when they're about YC or YC-funded companies. That's literally the first rule of HN moderation:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...
That doesn't mean we don't moderate them at all, since the internet would drive a truck through a loophole like that. But we do err on that side, since keeping the good faith of the community is more important than any particular story.
Regarding YC companies, I totally understand and trust that you and other moderators are not killing negative stories on YC companies. But I've noticed that sometimes these stories just disappear, and I don't know if this has anything to do with the fact that YC founders likely have high karma and are likely friends with other users with high karma. This is why I used the word "inadvertently" in my description of this — I truly think it may just be an artifact of how the algorithms interact and the fact that YC founders may end up having more clout than the average commenter. Basically, I don't know what powers are unlocked at different levels (I know new users can't downvote comments, for example), and I wonder if high-karma users have powers that I (~2700) do not have. And even if they don't have explicit powers, does their downvoting or flagging have a much bigger impact on whether comments or stories are killed?
Thanks for weighing in. You and the other folks who handle hn@ emails have always been prompt when I emailed with questions.
If you have concerns about any specific stories I'd be happy to take a look. It's best to email hn@ycombinator.com because we don't see most comments that get posted here.
And besides, the mods are making a tremendous job of it. I wildly disagree with lots of their decisions, and probably with great part of their general outlook on life, but I really can't fault their taste or professionalism, so thank you, guys.
The one cowardly thing going on here is the doing of users, not of moderators: The sad and unworthy tendency of some to downvote comments to oblivion purely for opinions expressed. Now that is a kind of grassroots censorship which we could do without.
I find this comment difficult to understand. The success and value of a site like HN largely depends on a community who submits stories and engages in discussion about those stories.
Stating "This is a private site" and "take it or leave it" is not only unnecessarily dismissive but its a false dichotomy. Liking something and wanting to see it improve are not mutually exclusive.
Harvey, the Storm That Humans Helped Cause (23 points)
ES6 imports syntax considered harmful (12 points)
White-Owned Restaurants Shamed for Serving Ethnic Food (33 points)
The evidence is piling up – Silicon Valley is being destroyed (27 points)
Personally I'm glad all of these posts were flagged.
But I don't think they should have been flagged "because I disagree with them."
Have you considered, perhaps, changing your behavior?
If you're concerned about a specific IP, and haven't been abusing HN, it should be easy to clear up by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. And even if you have been abusing HN, we're always happy to unban people (and/or their IPs) if they give us reason to believe that they've taken https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to heart and will follow the rules in the future.
Edit to add: Without more details from you, I can imagine the mods being hamstrung with respect to figuring out or explaining what's going with what you're observing. Likewise, there's nothing preventing you from continuing your comments here while also emailing them. Particularly as it seems you'd like to continue to participate on HN. I can imagine you'd prefer to do so without the hassle you're currently experiencing.
Perhaps that is done to avoid the rate limiter?
I can usually only make five posts in one 8-hour span, and then the sixth attempt says, "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks. Also, don't count the number of posts tptacek can make in one thread in one hour and compare it to your total for the entire week, or it might raise your blood pressure."
I am barred from having more than half a conversation in one day, while it seems that [some] others can post as often as they can hit "[reply]". So yes, I do feel censored on HN. The article didn't even mention the post-rate limits.
Also since you mentioned a particular user your comment will be removed. Funny how that works.
I can recall at least one instance where he replied to me directly, and I wanted to engage, but couldn't, because I was "posting too fast".
It's the network neutrality issue writ small. Some people have fast lanes on this site, and others have slow lanes. I don't like it here, and it annoys me when I notice it. If it becomes the status quo for the whole network, you can be sure that I will be engaging in "shovel vigilantism" in the dark of some nights. Freedoms of speech and publication are no longer supportive of liberty and equality when certain favored people are allocated 10000 times as much speech as most other people are usually allowed, and drown out all other voices with their sheer volume rather than the merit of their claims.
Maybe that is the problem.
Why are you so surprised he might have multiple accounts? You really have one email account? How about work-related email? Company-facing related email? If anything, its actually good he has multiple accounts and stuff related to / from his company account he is posting from company, and private is private.
No, I have 5, but I only have one HN account. Why would I need more?
I was thinking more that he might have been identified as being the same person posting from multiple accounts, and activating some kind of spam/abuse protection.
For same reason you have multiple email addresses no?
Others might but I can't think why off the top of my head. The only time I've seen an obvious alternate account is the throw-away accounts opened just to troll/spam the site.
Shadowbans are reversible by users and can be appealed to the mods, assuming you notice it (which, by design, you're not supposed to.) This is supposed to ensure that only accounts which should be banned remained banned.
It's not perfect, but it does make sense - the only real options for banning are by IP and by account, so if you want to prevent a banned user from just making a new account, you have to ban the IP as well. Maybe someone was a troll and got that IP banned, maybe it appears on a blacklist (assuming HN checks that,) who knows? It's not random and arbitrary, though.
At some point I noticed that I never got replies, but didn't think much of it, continued posting. Then, one day I looked at my profile while I was logged out, and surprise - the the posts for the last few months are no longer there.
Like OP, I went through a few accounts. They worked for a bit, and then responses dropped off. Eventually, I realized that apparently, my new apartment's IP is toxic.
Not sure who a shadow ban is supposed to punish since any spam bot can check just as trivially of they're banned. On the other hand, legitimate users have no idea keep wasting their time submitting their comments to /dev/null.
By now I have given up on trying to comment on HN. I can use my time on better things.
Ironic that a the site like HN can't get a proper quoting markup, can't fix the pre-block scroll, took forever to add support for mobile and comment collapsing, and used blanket IP bans...
I for one think that I am spending too much time here (relative to the stuff that I learn). (Lets see how long I can keep off site, after all this is adictive ;-)
I would appreciate it if someone would come up with a filter, HN on tech subjects only, and no politics and business stories - a mere title line is not enough to figure out the context (but they do that on purpose, to involve more people that way, don't they :-) actually I guess that would be easy to do with NLP tagging...
One thing that I dislike with both HN and reddit style moderation system is that the subject of the editorial action has no idea that he/she has been edited out. I think that actually gives the pleasant feeling of being in an insane asylum. Anybody can relate ti this sentiment?
Fortunately its relatively easy to launch a site like HN. A problem is a solution waiting to happen. If there is competition and it affects HN they are not going to sit back, there will be more transparency. However good something is competition is essential to keep people on their toes, so there is a largish lacuna here for the health of the industry.
Having said that any popular site will have the exact same issues HN does, so if the point is merely to change decision makers by those jockeying for influence then its a pointless exercise of exaggerating issues to gain influence, ironically how most new products are launched on HN these days.
How often do users change the titles of their submissions? There's no way to tell.
Whatever is going on to achieve it, HN is a great online community, and so maybe that is due to the moderation. Sometimes I wonder if it might be in spite of the moderation, but who knows :)
the precipitous drop that happens to stories after their titles have been changed shows a very strong editorial bias going on. I think there is a general strategy of keeping highly controversial political topics off of HN.
The question is, when does this sort of censorship constitute an ideological crackdown in its own right.
I took a quick look at your recent history and it seems fine, so I'll take the rate limit off. But to prevent it from kicking in again, please stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I recall that we had to ask you many times in the past not to violate that, but hopefully it's all in the past now and things will be nice and guideliney going forward.
I recall submitting something that got around 7 upvotes in 30 minutes but it got dead and buried and never presented itself on the front page. The content wasn't edgy and it wasn't clickbait.
But a few days later I saw an unrelated post with 2 upvotes after 1 full hour and it was magically on the front page.
If a post with 2 upvotes after 1 hour can be on the front page but a post with 7 upvotes in 30 minutes is not, then surely there needs to be some type of manual intervention happening. Glad to see there's data showing this now and I'm not going crazy.
I've had accounts banned for no apparent reason, or for laughable reasons that are not even in the poorly written guidelines.
Moderators also have been repeatedly caught about heavy handed moderation. They control the platform, they control the message, they do not allow meta discussion, why believe anything they say?
HN controls what views they allow on their forum, certainly not a place to have a free and open discussion.
I don't understand why the articles shown that had to their titles changed also were deranked.
They moderate.
It seems not very hard to register an HN account.
If you don't have showdead on, you might not notice that many posts by new accounts are marked as dead immediately, and it's usually justified.
I think the "until" is "until all readers of this site share a single sociological view on controversial issues and/or lose all interest in having their view heard." Asking your moderation tools to solve societal problems or prevent a discussion forum from reflecting a raging societal debate is trying to hide from the problem.
> it only takes 2-3 misogynist trolls to create a 300-comment shitshow
I get what you mean, but would argue that, "it only takes 2-3 trolls plus 300 people who respond to them to create a 300-comment shitshow". An ignored troll is a powerless troll. They get their power to disrupt from the responses, not their words.
I like this idea, but I don't think it's possible to get the shared agreement you discuss. I've never seen an online community where the hands-off, community-ignore method worked. Have you seen one?
Individual flagging does not work to recover toxic threads. Flags are too slow and too invisible. By the time the worst stuff gets knocked down, its authors --- almost all of whom have no meaningful reputation on this site --- have reached the win condition of having guided the thread into hellish nerd litigation in which even the reasonable people grappling with the issues are made to write comments that serve trollish ends.
Flagging is what we have, and I'll continue to do it just like you will. But it does not work. It is inadequate to the task. This problem requires sitewide intervention, and until that happens, it is a rational, reasonable, moral choice to flag this stuff off the site as a harm mitigation mechanism.
My basic disagreement is that 'just ignore it' and 'don't do things that attract their attention' are not viable strategies for target populations, and it's unjust to systematically shift the burden of responsibility from persistent antagonists to their victims.
I'm interested in your programmatic approach, but let's talk about that offsite.
A la the multireddit feature, if I could combine the page views & upvotes, and filter out the flags & downvotes, of you and everyone you recommend in your profile, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't see the trolls, flamewars.
I used to moderate forums. Major chore. The notion of just following people you like, trust would remove a lot of the moderator's make work.
A basic problem in liberal (as in laissez-faire) politics is conflict aversion; victims of bullying are frequently treated worse than their antagonists, because it's less work. That creates perverse incentives, to put it mildly.
What I won't sign onto is an endless series of septic threads maintained just to illustrate how inadequate the moderating response to this problem is.
How about:
"Curation by moderators"
How about:
"Curation by Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China"
"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions"
For example, on YouTube, hate speech [which I know isn't actually a thing] is commonplace - they don't feel the need (or perhaps don't have the resources) to censor comments which certain people find detestable. But they have created complex systems to analyze videos so that they can identify certain ones and remove them automatically. The end result is that censorship isn't applied uniformly. In one example, a YouTube account that was documenting videos of attacks on the people of Raqqa was flagged for spreading terrorist propaganda. You could make the argument that while the hate speech didn't impact their bottom line, the videos could, so they accept a certain amount of unequal and unintentional censorship in order to maintain their business position, defend their corporate values, and of course, retain their user base.
Moderation is a more nuanced and human approach to censorship. By giving people second chances, answering emails, giving the occasional explanation, etc they build social capital and prevent emotional backlash that could threaten the status of the forum. By helping users to understand the error of their ways and have a chance to redeem themselves, they can't be accused of unfair treatment. But they are indeed imposing specific social and political values on their users, to the point of hiding or removing the post or user when it doesn't align with their values. This shapes not only the quality of the dialogue, but its content. This is the essence of censorship.
To severely paraphrase 1984: "To control speech you control language, as controlling language controls thought."
Could you elaborate a bit more on this part? I find your post quite insightful and well thought out as a whole (though my sarcasm detectors may be a bit off especially when it comes to the above sentence), but in any case, I'm not sure why you wrote "that's not the point" when everything you say seems to support exactly that point.
If you think of moderation as a tool to shape the flow of discussion in a certain pre-approved way (without, say "malicious" intent, though that can always become debatable from someone's point of view), when does moderation become censorship, or more specifically - at which point are the users allowed to think that the moderation actually became censorship? I mean, who sets the criteria? The moderator?
A moderator is supposed to be an arbitrator or mediator. Moderation becomes censorship when they start enforcing policies to get users to align with their values rather than simply bringing people to an accord. Users are allowed to think it's censorship once they lose their value or become a liability.
To someone who happened to live under a de facto Soviet occupation (not de jure, after all it was just a "requested friendly intervention with the noble intent of suppressing the rising nation-wide anti-people criminal elements, that just kind of somehow happened to last for a few decades"), this kind of wording (and the associated themes) sound indeed very familiar.
But it's interesting to see how many HN users don't see this as troubling at all, at least judging by the dozen (-s?) of downvotes that my original comment earned me since posting, not even mentioning how quickly other people that somehow dared to draw a parallel between censorship and the other, friendly kind of censorship got quickly downvoted into white five minutes from posting.
As a basic example, parents frequently censor their children, but we call that "childrearing". Managers censor their workers, but some of that is necessary to run a company.
Don't get caught up in the comparison to a fascist regime. Plenty of left-wing socially conscious movements use this same tactic. I think everyone does this, usually unconsciously.
Unless you have examples where it has been the case, that's an unfair comparison.
Well, yes. I really appreciate what dang & the rest of the moderators do in order to remove spam & optimise for quality — yet at the same time I really dislike a large number of the instances I've seen where they've exercised control to protect the party line from criticism (e.g. detaching subthreads or posting 'please don't argue X; we don't accept that here'). My perception (which of course is subjective, subject to confirmation bias & could be wrong) is that the vast majority of those instances I've seen have been egregiously wrong.
I've noticed fewer instances recently, perhaps because the moderators have been silently moderating or perhaps because they've actually refrained from exercising so heavy a hand.
Like I said, I approve of the good they do with respect to quality, but I actively disapprove of the censorship they have committed. Instances of the former greatly outweigh instances of the latter, but one instance of censorship is too many (it is, of course, Y Combinator's site to do with as they will).
Freedom of Speech is a restriction on the government, not a duty on the part of private individuals to let you come in and piss on their living room carpet.
They don't have a legal obligation to behave this way, but that needs to stop being used as an excuse to shut down discussions on how to make the community better.
In arguing that CNN's decision not to air your opinions in prime time is legitimate while HN's decision to be selective about what they'll provide a venue for isn't, you've accepted unquestioningly CNN's constraints while dismissing HN's.
In both cases, you're applying an enormous amount of subjectivity. But you'd prefer not to acknowledge that, and so have instead attempted to reframe the discussion as if your conclusions about CNN and HN are self-evidently objective. They are not.
I didn't think you had a point, it looked like you were asking contrived questions so you could antagonize him with his answers and "win" the argument, instead of just making your comment about subjectivity in the first place.
I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still talk on thousands of other places.
I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.
I would argue that this is definitely censorship. Just because you can go somewhere else doesn't mean you aren't being censored - you are being denied access to the HN audience. Somewhere else isn't going to have the same audience. And that audience isn't making the decision - a small number of moderators are. But you're right that this is just down to pedantic word choice, feel free to discard this thread of the discussion if you'd rather not push the matter further.
>I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.
I'm not here touting free speech like it's a legal right I have as a submitter and an obligation HN has as a publisher. Instead I'm touting it as a damn good idea that makes for a better medium for discussion and suggeting HN embraces it anyway.
Think you're right. You completely ignored my point, so this is pointless. But the root issue is not different than, either through ignorance or deceptive calculation, claiming that copyright infringement is theft. It is a category error that negatively effects people's understanding of what's going on, so it matters.
It's not about justifications, it's about prerogatives.
> There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral.
Despite what you seem to be implying, the operators of a privately run forum have no moral obligation to let anyone speak, regardless of how that might impact the quality of discussion in the community. It is totally fair for participants to criticize the moderation efforts, but just because the site is high profile doesn't mean that the moderators are any more morally obligated to permit comment than you are morally obligated to amend your fine article with my commentary.
Just to recontextualize that: if I have a blog, am I immoral for not allowing comments? Am I immoral for not allowing guest bloggers? Do I have a moral obligation to allow advertisement?
This is odd. A moral obligation to use one’s private resources to provide an audience to all comers isn’t free speech; it’s not even a free marketplace of ideas. It’s appropriating someone else’s communications infrastructure.
A failure to maintain that identity would fundamentally change their offering and lose them their audience. You make it sound like a trivial expenditure of Nothing more than a little bandwidth.
And you haven’t meaningfully distinguished it from a blog. Blogs host comments; they host guest posts, and multiple authors. The degree to which they’re one voice or many depends on their individual structure - and none of that contradicts your core moral statement about the immoral act being not letting people have a free-for-all on your private platform. You make a distinction without rationale for why some private platforms are allowed to curate their offerings, and why others are /immoral/ for doing skz
>A failure to maintain that identity would fundamentally change their offering and lose them their audience. You make it sound like a trivial expenditure of Nothing more than a little bandwidth.
They have rules and guidelines, and they set the overall topic by calling it Hacker News. Users do the rest by voting up stuff that they find relevant or interesting. This doesn't work everywhere, but it works here. I've seen it first hand by browsing my stats, posts that are off-topic don't make it far.
>And you haven’t meaningfully distinguished it from a blog. Blogs host comments; they host guest posts, and multiple authors.
Your blog is still curated. I can't make an account on your blog and post an article to it without being invited by you and presumably having you read and approve it. On HN, on the other hand, every submission is like this. If you make a "blog" where every article is submitted by users, then I'm going to give you the same speech.
Or that a rape survivor has an obligation to allow someone to post on their site that there's no such thing as rape and every woman is "asking for it"?
I deeply question your moral framework.
- Have well defined rules
- Enforce them equally
- Moderate transaprently
That's it. I'm not asking for an unfettered platform for free speech. If one of your rules is "no hateful posts targetting specific people or people groups", then it's a well justified decision to remove that post.
For a different approach to moderation, check out Lobsters.
Yes, likely >90% of the site is done through voting, but a significant amount of pruning and bumping clearly also occurs.
"Popular things go to the top" is a pretty good first approximation of the algorithm. You have things getting flagged to death for generating bad conversation/flamewars (kinda like parents telling kids to stop playing rough since people are getting hurt). There's the hiring posts. At least to me, it's always felt like moderation is happening at the margins.
People complaining now should find someone who's been on here for a long time and ask what it was like under Paul Graham. Hint: not better.
Please elaborate before being so dismissive--you know, like we used to do on old HN.
The difference between the site post-Dan and pre-Dan --- you know, the "old" HN vs. today --- is that you can repeatedly write unfounded accusations like that today and not have your account shadowbanned and all your comments rank-penalized, like they were when Paul Graham ran the site. We all accepted those arbitrary moderation decisions back then, when there was no pretense of fairness or equity in moderation. Now that we have it, we attack the people who spend their time assuring it by making preposterous comparisons to the "good old days".
I am not arguing dang is doing a bad job--I'm arguing that their job is done with an eye more towards keeping a community in line with YC interests than promoting pure free-speech or hacker culture.
That includes things like killing off certain contentious posts, removing grossly off-topic material, and a lot of other frankly decent moderation.
> Yes, your account has a penalty that accounts get when they post too many low-quality comments--specifically ones that are uncivil and/or unsubstantive and/or tediously argumentative.
That's how it was explained to me, by Dan. He didn't stop the practice, and I'd contend he's probably doubled down on it.
The entire second paragraph of the comment to which I replied is wrong. Your followup (which ascribes motive to me, something I note you've gone after others for doing in this thread) is also wrong. I'm not litigating anything. I'm pointing out that you're wrong. You're also forgiven for not being aware of this, given your typical comment quality and status.
I care much less than you do whether they’re “legitimate,” I assure you. You’re projecting not reading on me, to be perfectly honest. Why on earth would I litigate my account status with you, of all people? It’s amusing you think I need to be reminded that you’re the wrong person for that, because I already know that. To me, just to be direct about this, you represent among the worst of HN’s qualities as evidenced all over this thread.
You’re just wrong about HN changing. It hasn’t. Yeah, dang and sctb announce bans now. There’s more to it, and in my experience, many of those decisions are just as arbitrary as they were when pg ran this place.
Everything else is an uncivil sideshow you’re dragging me into. Endgame: you’ll remain you, I’m probably stacking up further penalization rising to it, and life will go on. How about sticking to the fact that you’re wrong instead of exploiting your status to be as uncivil as you are with no fear of the exact repercussions you claim have softened because you’re not exposed to them?
Because it seems like we have zero evidence either which way, and your account is seemingly always on the status quo side.
Myself, I see fuck all discussion on here any more that reminds me of old HN.
> We downweight posts in response to things that go against the site guidelines, such as when a submission is unsubstantive, baity or sensational.
So, this is what's happening already.
Would be nice if we could have a discussion on it instead of just saying it's impossible though - is this a community of hackers or just apologists?
I'm willing a optimize for precision over recall here.
Agreed. If you try to make something more prescriptive then you end up with a massive increase in bureaucracy as you try to categorise every kind of content and every type of way of presenting that content. Effectively you turn moderators into lawyers and judges.
As user base grows, all platforms suffer from mean reversion or "Eternal September" where quality of the content reverses towards low quality issues. If you want to keep up the quality you need editorial staff. Call them curators, editors or moderators if you want.
What I would like to happen is HN editing being transparent. Show buried or nudged content differently so that those who submit can adapt.
With the weakening of the Google workaround that's baked into the HN header, more and more submissions are going to run afoul of that condition.
While I agree that this would be a great idea, it's laughable in that, as a service run by Y Combinator, it's always going to be for startup hucksters primarily and for the rest of the tech industry and Internet at large secondarily.