Comment by tomhoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomhoward | Hacker News Reader

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Before you comment or think too much more about this topic, it might be helpful to (re-)familiarise yourself with the guidelines about what is on-topic vs off-topic on HN [1]

In particular, what is on-topic is:

Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [...] If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

That's it. Anything is allowed, and is embraced by the community, as long as it is intellectually interesting and cultivates interesting discussions, and people flag things that that are repetitive and lead to boring, predictable discussions.

Remember that the topic that triggered this discussion was Github's decision to remove from trending, a repo that was trending only due to activist campaigning, not due to being an interesting software project.

There has been no shortage of discussion about the MS/Github deal in the past week; there have been multiple stories about it on the front page at almost any time since the acquisition speculation began. For this particular micro-drama to be deemed below the standard of intellectual curiosity that HN expects, does not indicate any failure that needs to be remedied.

Can you not believe that after so many years of observing and guiding this community, that dang has developed a good sense of what the majority of the community wants and how best to keep it healthy?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you, I am very much familiar with the site guidelines.

GitHub's Trending page has previously featured many similar projects, open letters and other non-software repositories, so I don't see how this is relevant here.

I understand that not all readers are interested in or even affected by GitHub's acquisition; however, a large number of them are. For this reason, a downvote button would be significantly more effective and democratic than giving two or three users the ability to completely hide a popular submission they do not agree with.

I do believe that dang and the Hacker News moderators have developed a good sense of how to keep the community healthy. Unfortunately, the most reliable way of accomplishing this is to eliminate any and all controversy that could lead to debates and arguments. This, however, is not indicative of a good community, it simply places users in a filter bubble by only showing them content that no two other users have ever disagreed with.

Despite eliminating nearly all arguments and controversy, this nonlinear voting mechanism is dangerous to the community and society as a whole, even if it gives the impression of a healthy community. Removing controversial submissions just as quickly as spam, child pornography and incitement to violence as can be expected from oppressive regimes is not an indicator of a healthy community, but rather that of a community that only gets to see what everyone agrees with.

Many people who have spent much more time on Hacker News than I have agree that there is room for improvement (see, for example, the analysis from last year that I linked to above). Unfortunately, simply hiding all controversial submissions saves the moderators time, and it seems that they are currently not interested in investing additional time into creating a truly healthy community, one that is capable of remaining healthy despite openly holding and expressing different opinions, and thus the current form of moderation is likely going to remain as it is now.

> "I understand that not all readers are interested in or even affected by GitHub's acquisition"

Most people on HN are interested and affected, which is why it's been discussed so much in the past week [1]. Few if any stories have been so heavily discussed in all of HN's history.

> "giving two or three users the ability to completely hide a popular submission they do not agree with"

> "it simply places users in a filter bubble by only showing them content that no two other users have ever disagreed with"

If that was actually how the site worked, top users would mutiny, the whole community would depart, and then dang would lose his job as there'd be no community left for him to moderate.

> "eliminating nearly all arguments and controversy"

> "Removing controversial submissions just as quickly as spam"

There's disagreement and controversy on HN all the time. HN is not controversy-averse, it's averse to stories that lack originality and substance.

> "Many people who have spent much more time on Hacker News than I have agree that there is room for improvement (see, for example, the analysis from last year"

Sure. I agree there is room for improvement. Dang agrees there is room for improvement. You'll note that dang participated actively in the discussion thread about that post, and even helped with the writing of it by providing clarifications.

> "it seems that they are currently not interested in investing additional time into creating a truly healthy community"

Dang spends all day every day (including most weekends) working to make this community healthy, which includes reading and considering all the feedback that comes his way. He does this like his livelihood depends on it, because it does; if HN declines, he's out of a job.

It really does seem like your critiques are based on misapprehensions.

It's good that you're so passionate about helping to make HN better, but you'll be more effective at that if you spend some time properly understanding it :)

Anyway, I've said all I have to say so I think we're done here.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date...

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