Comment by Yuval_Halevi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Yuval_Halevi | Hacker News Reader

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Comment I saw about the manner from a mod on reddit:

>As a moderator, I will sometimes send a message to a poster whose post is removed. However, if it is "commercial spam," I don't bother because we both know why.

Sometimes redditors comment without understanding that they broke the rules. Sometimes redditors comment using spam and they fully know what they are doing. In the first case, a message to them to tell them why is helpful. In the second case, it's not.

I personally (as an active Reddit user), feel that the interaction with the mods there is always in a negative context. On /r/technology, for example, you can get ban without any specific reason and messaging the mods won't do anything.

A few weeks ago I made a silly comment in HN on a post that reached the front page. My comment got a few downvotes and one of the mods sent me a message with what I did wrong.

I then went one step back, understood that I wrote something that is against the rules of HN and sent the mod an email with an apologie. He replied almost instantly.

That's one of the reasons I prefer HN over Reddit. It seems like the mods are not here to punish, but to create a healthy conversation infrastructure and to lead users who are not into the HN spirit yet, into the right path

I agree that even though the HN moderation tends to be more heavy handed, it's 100% beneficial for the community. However I doubt that the HN approach would scale well for a site like reddit— once you have dozens or hundreds of people doing moderation it gets hard to vet someone. Eventually you're gonna get a jerk moderator that goes on a power trip. I was a fan of how slashdot did "metamoderation" but I don't know if it was actually effective.

Could not disagree more; the community is an echo chamber because of how poorly dang treats dissent, and more importantly how easy it is to silence alternative viewpoints here.

As a result, growth doesn't happen here, only self validation. Try taking a nuanced view on privacy if you disagree.

Can you be more specific about the “dissent” and the “nuanced view” parts?

People will flag a comment they don't like, hop on multiple accounts to spam downvotes, will downvote everything a person writes (via their comment history), all kinds of malicious behavior on HN if someone posts something they disagree with.

It doesn't take many of those people to ruin the experience for others, and dang doesn't lift a finger A) because he's of the opinion that disagreement amongst users is bad for HN and B) the software running HN is old and not sophisticated enough to detect bad actors.

I had to abandon my other account recently because I'd get hit with 10-15 downvotes in the span of 3-5 minutes, multiple times a day as I was using the site. Many hours of minimal activity and then boom, minus 15 karma, all at once, corresponding precisely with the number of comments I had that were votable (less than a day old).

Not sure how to describe a nuanced point of view though, it's a point of view that loses critical fidelity when generalized. If the generalization falls into the "dissent" bucket, it's then given the above treatment by bad actors on HN, which has the effect of only allowing a single specific viewpoint to exist on HN, because "flagged" messages aren't displayed at all, and downvoted comments are literally hard to read via fading.

I meant specific about the content of your dissent.

Dissenting opinions are basically just different from the majority. Anarchist opinions are like this, vegan opinions are like this. Fascist opinions are also like this. Just saying it’s dissent is not too informative.

Informative? Seems like you want to mitigate my theoretical dissent, to be honest...

Whether I'd want to migitate it is entirely based on the content of your dissent. That's my point really.

There's all kinds of dissent which should absolutely be moderated away on a forum like HN.

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