A Pragmatic Approach to Thorny People Problems
witnesstodestruction.blogspot.com
witnesstodestruction.blogspot.com
I like what this article says, and would like to support the promotion of it's content without adding further confounding additional language.
Should I have upvoted the article and said nothing?
P.P.S. This comment could be posted on most things I see on HN without further editing, and would convey what I feel about them.
It depends on who your target audience is: yourself, strangers, coworkers, or friends?
If you want others to follow this advice, do those same people use HN? If not, what approach will help them see this?
Do you want to save it, and your thoughts on the article for later review? I do this publicly to wrap my head around the problem so I can try to get others to pick apart my mistakes (though perhaps to not great effect due to echo chambers).
To your specific post for this thread: does the article pose a question or an answer? I believing that is trying to answer a question.
To the boring meta part: It's my common approach to upvote without replying (sometimes I write the post add discard it). I'm not 100% clear on the HN culture and focus my replies to further the discussion (this being a meta post feels weird).
Both comments, and upvotes keep a that "alive", having read a few articles due to the sheer number of responses, I believe higher vested effort increases likelihood of others investing time (this is true but only of posts, but work in general).
Onto other articles: I like discussing the topics with data behind them. IBMs Mac rollout is interesting, but I'm wondering (given the source) if it's a PR piece.
To the target audience: It depends on if it's me as a recipient for practicing or me as a vehicle for spreading more humility when working with others (strangers on the internet).
In this case: I'm going to try to remember and reference this article. I don't want to share it yet as I haven't practiced it. (with this post being more a response to your question than the article)
Perhaps the best way to promote this post is living it with intent and sharing it when others ask how you deal with the problem (hopefully doing so well), thus directly answering your question: Upvote and thank you for posting so I could think about this more :)
> If one person’s presence is derailing the conversation for some reason, don’t automatically decide they must be the bad guy. The absolute worst thing you can do is to tell that person to shut up and leave the discussion while allowing other people to keep attacking them in some way. This includes everyone rebutting their comments that they are no longer allowed to defend because they were asked to stop posting.
I belonged to a different forum for a time where that was official mod policy. Being rate limited, having a comment flagged to death by other users or even being shadow banned on HN where other users can still vouch for your comments is not the same as being publicly told to stop participating in X discussion by a mod and then punished if you dare to defend yourself as others talk all kinds of trash about you while the mods do nothing about it because they are fine with some in-crowd group being awful to some out-crowd group and actively encourage that as a matter of more-or-less official policy.
It's marginalization, fundamentally. A very small group of people (or a single person) decides to use their power to silence you, tell you how wrong you are, and tie your hands behind your proverbial back so you can't defend yourself.
Dang supports it, and others join in. I can't tell you how many times I'll be browsing HN and see my score drop from one page load to the next by exactly as many points as I have comments in my history that can be downvoted. Or how many times a comment of mine gets flagged for reasons that have nothing to do with the HN guidelines.
This forum is broken, and is in dire need of disruption.
I generally have a lot of respect for HN mods, it's never an easy job.
HN is not built to handle dissent. Privileges are based on votes, there are minimal to no vote protection tools in place, the guidelines are used as cudgels to beat people who disagree with the popular view, and the moderator (there's more or less only one, dang) prefers to smokescreen and gaslight anyone he doesn't like with generic comments that don't follow the very guidelines he's trying to enforce. Just look at his comment history; it's full of "This doesn't follow guidelines" without any elaboration, and when he does elaborate, it's an incredibly cynical and not-generous interpretation of the comment he's saying isn't acceptable, which is itself a violation of the HN guidelines, specifically the one about addressing the best form of an argument.
Most of the problem is the fact that dang is the primary active moderator on HN. If others were to take over, and he were to be removed or retire, HN would become substantially better, possibly overnight.
Dang needs to be removed for this site to grow and improve. People think HN is growing; it is not. The quality people who used to post here are more or less gone, and HN isn't attracting new quality posters to fill their shoes, precisely because dang moderates very poorly, which pushes away prospective high value posters.
The reality is, it's high time for a replacement to HN.
Part of the reason you are getting so very much negative attention in this specific discussion is because your comment complaining about the very site you are posting on was the very first comment posted.
This actively interferes with constructive discussion of the article posted as everyone replies to you and your personal complaints instead of engaging with the content of the article. (The term for it is thread shitting. As the author of the piece, I wasn't real happy to see it.)
You also keep focusing on the negative and on points of disagreement and will not drop it.
I'm sympathetic to your frustration, but there are pieces of this that only you can change. I'm aware you are likely to feel I'm "blaming the victim" rather than trying to empower you. My personal default is to wonder what I can do differently on my end to get better outcomes because I'm typically the piece of the equation I have the most control over, regardless of "who is to blame." I'm generally satisfied with that approach.
Last, I will note that my advice to not automatically assume that this one person is behaving badly doesn't translate to "there is no point at which a mod should ever hold an individual accountable for their piece of the puzzle."
That doesn't work. You don't get a free pass for your behavior for all eternity because you're -- for example -- a woman posting in an overwhelmingly male space.
If I thought being a woman posting on HN meant I can do anything at all that I feel like doing and then blame negative reactions on sexism, I would have been banned ages ago -- and rightly so. Saying that it's not okay for the entire group to behave badly towards one individual and then blame their victim for their own choices absolutely doesn't mean the needs of one individual should trump the needs of the entire community. A moderator's job is to find ways to try to serve both needs at the same time, which is a balancing act.
Please note that I waited to say anything to you until after the piece dropped off the front page in hopes of having fewer eyes on my comment, among other things. I thought about various possible tactics and concluded that replying late was probably the least worst option available to me.
I am certainly not guiltless, but consider the fact that I have none of these problems anywhere else I interact with others. Why is it just on HN that I run into these struggles? I am in lots of communities through my daily interactions, and I successfully navigate those, so what's special about HN, other than dang and the site's mechanics?
This place cannot handle dissent. That's literally the definition of a toxic environment, and dang does nothing to create safety for people who might not agree with the mainstream view. That's on him.
edit: I just looked briefly at the recent threads in your comment history and had to laugh at "I'm afraid I don't really follow what you've written here." And I see your reply here is flagged-and-killed. I continue to not deny any of your complaints specifically.
B. If you think it's absolutely not you and dang and HN are simply broken because everyone else likes you just fine, the logical solution is to just leave. I've basically done that numerous times over the years -- left a forum that just didn't work for me personally -- and I've generally not been all blamey about it. In most cases, I leave quietly and don't run around trash talking them afterwards. I don't expect every single forum to be a good fit for me personally.
C. If you decide you value something about HN enough to keep coming back in spite of the problems you are experiencing, there are some best practices for trying to make that work. Here are a few:
1. Try to understand why other people do what they do in a sympathetic manner. This includes dang.
2. Try to focus on what you can do differently more than on what you wish others would do differently.
3. Try to put some of your negative feelings down and stop making your baggage about the site a large part of your focus when engaging in discussion here. It just keeps the problem alive unnecessarily.
D. I don't really care to engage you further here. I decided replying late was the least worst answer in part because not replying at all can come across as "giving someone the cold shoulder" and can add to their problems, if only inadvertently.
But the bane of my personal existence is people who latch onto me personally and act like they think I'm personally required to meet their emotional needs, magically fix their problem that I have no power to fix, be endlessly kind to them while they are ugly to me and so forth. Choosing to respond in hopes that it might help you does not make me personally responsible for your feelings and your problems for all eternity.
Edit: in the interest of avoiding temptation to reply to you again, please note that my introduction to you was you thread shitting my post which is an article I personally wrote. Yet you clearly seem to think you never do anything wrong and it's everyone else here and also seem to think I should care greatly about your feelings and your needs and your problems while you care absolutely not at all about mine.
That's a big fat Nope.
Your opinion of me, your ability to help/not help me, and all the other interpersonal things you're bringing into this are just your baggage. I thought you wrote a great article that had a few specific passages I felt dang should in particular read, and I called that out publicly. If that's "thread shitting", I think maybe you need to re-evaluate the kind of personal relationship you have with people who read your writing.
I think your edit here is an emotional one, and I'm not really going to address it further beyond pointing out in the very comment you're replying to I take some responsibility for my role in how I'm treated here.
It's because HN is, actually, a very unique internet message board. It is unique in that it takes its own guidelines very seriously and enforces them very actively. Compared to every single other internet message board I've been on (and I've been around the block a few times, like they say) flamewars are prevented effectively and personal attacks are simply not tolerated.
For me, that's what keeps me combing back for more. HN is, well, a safe place, where I can disagree with others, very strongly, without risking that a thread will degenerate into put-downs and name-calling. This is in stark contrast to other message boards where there seems to be a genuine belief that "winning" a thread is some kind of achievement worthy of praise and self-respect.
So to be honest, if you're struggling to adjust to HN but you're feeling fine on other message boards then I'm inclined to believe that, on the balance of probabilities, it's because you bring with you behaviours and ways of communicating that you've learned on other message boards that are incompatible with HN, and that you are unwilling to change.
P.S. :%s/combing back/coming back/g. But it's a funny one, so I'm leaving it like that.
HN isn't special, dang is the problem, specifically dang. He needs to go. If he goes, I can thrive just fine. During the times he leaves me alone I thrive in here. When he attacks me, that's when I struggle.
This addiction to HN being a special place is complete and utter nonsense, and if that's the koolaid you're drinking, we have little to say to one another.
I don't fully understand the mindset that would do this, but it certainly happens.
In this case am I right to say you feel you are the recipient of unfair abuse? More so then single individual downvotes can be expected? When this happens you feel your opinions aren't respected and valued? I feel shitty when that happens too. I've avoided commenting on controversial threads as a result.
I think the problem is what you're saying is lost in your tone (it also appears to be happening in this post too).
Most forums have some kind of backstop that prevents the vindictive from causing too much harm. This forum has a vindictive moderator. He needs to go.
I've spent a lot of time trying to deal with this conflict & trying to be heard and understood. Part of the trick is not taking things too personally, not Making things personal or directing them at an Individual, and instead continuously focusing on the topic at hand. If things devolve to personal attacks of Any sort, I disengage or try to re-focus. My goal is to be heard and understood, and that doesn't happen when the argument devolves to a personal level.
It's hard not to react, but sometimes not reacting & taking the high road is the most productive way forward.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Once an account has a history on HN, we tell people that we're banning them and why.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Might allay some of the accusations we're seeing here of accused abuses.
If that's right, then it's worse than that, because then metaness would consume a lot more resources than it already does, starving the rest of the site of other things we need to work on. That would be a vicious feedback loop; I'd rather look for virtuous ones.
I perceive no corresponding change in the amount of meta threads about mis-moderation; noodling debates based on random accusations are still evergreen here.
If I were involved in moderating HN (thank Christ I'm not), I'd conclude that substantive process-level changes aimed at quelling these kinds of debates probably aren't a productive goal.
Well, I never!
It's apparently a synonym for something I only think of as hell banned. My quirky brain thinks of HN banning as shadow banning because the comments are visible if you have "show dead" on and can often be brought back to life if couched for. (So, you live in the shadows.)
Thus being banned on HN doesn't necessarily mean you have no voice at all. It can mean fewer people will see your comments and only good comments will be brought to life.
This leaves the door open for expressing yourself and even for potentially finding your way back to being a member in good standing, though that may only happen if something substantially changes an your life.
But people do, at times, have substantial positive changes. Homeless people do sometimes get back into housing. Very sick people do sometimes get better. Drug addicts do sometimes get clean.
And then their behavior may improve without them "trying to behave better" because their life sucks less.
In my experience, on the one hand, most adults have some sort of personal problem that complicates their life, and on the other hand, people who dont' seem to be very troubled by what goes on in their personal life are perfectly capable of being disruptive assholes. So there is really no reason to single out specific classes of personal problems as causing disruptive behaviour.
I'm also confused by the way you use the term "sick". Do you mean it as in mental illness, or general sickness, like having the flu, or a chronic disease?
In any case, I think you're looking for a deeper explanation of why people behave like assholes online. I don't think there is one. People sometimes behave like assholes online, even when they're perfectly fine people otherwise. You just have to find a way to make them see their contributions as others see them, then they will stop being assholes because nobody likes to come accorss as an asshole. Online or off.
That said I do have a problem with silencing. This problem was solved in USENET with kill-lists, lists where each user can choose to ignore another list of users maintained democratically without resorting to a few mods, who can be benevolent or not. This is how we block spammy ip addresses using the hosts file! This is a solved problem with a simple solution, heck it can even be applied to every major social networking site out there.
On a side note, why can't HN code be made available on GitHub? It could be one of the biggest lisp projects overnight.
There's a very old version of HN that pg published years ago (at http://arclanguage.org/). It would be nice to get that updated and maintained, but separating out the secret parts would by now be a lot of work. The time to do it will be if and when we eventually release the alternative Arc implementations we've been working on.
implementations? plural?
Why not contribute to Anarki, at least the not-entirely-secret-sauce stuff like thread folding and vouching?
Yes, there's now an Arc-to-JS called Lilt, and an Arc-to-Common Lisp called Clarc. In order to to make those easier to develop, we reworked the lower depths of the existing Arc implementation to build Arc up in stages. The bottom one is called arc0, then arc1 is written in arc0, and then "real" Arc (the full language) is written in arc1. This makes reimplementation easier since you pack as much as possible in the later stages, and only arc0 needs to be written in the underlying system (Racket, JS, or CL).
It also shrank the total Arc implementation by 500 lines or so, which in pg and rtm-land is a couple enclycopedias' worth. That was satisfying, and an indication of how high-level a language Arc is.
Check out https://lobste.rs/about for a HN clone written with Ruby on Rails.
Source code available here: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters
I feel this is worded extermely clumsimly and it puts people who are homeless, sick or disabled (!) on the spot for causing trouble.
From my experience on HN and other internet message boards, people who are healthy and financially well-off can do a fine job of being disruptive and engaging in flame wars. I don't see the reason to single out homeless, sick or disabled people as being particularly notable for being disruptive.
> It is healthier to allow them to vigorously defend their point of view if they wish. If they are the only person representing a particular point of view or experience, do not act like “they are posting too much” if they reply to everyone talking with them about it.
Really wish dang would read this. HN takes the exact opposite approach to this and dang prefers to enforce this to avoid confrontation rather than create a space for conversation.
Edit: this is a great example. I can't reply to anyone here, because I'm rate limited, so people can say how many ways I'm wrong and I have no real ability to defend my argument. This is what dang wants, and it's incredibly toxic. The downvotes pour in and I'm helpless.
Hacker News doesn't let you respond to dead comments, so this isn't true.
Dang, do you perchance monitor any habitual downvoting of users by particular other users?
edit: lol, downvoted within 2 minutes. Here, I'll make it easy for you mysterious friend, here's another new one for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21545859
Could you please stop complaining about downvotes in HN comments? As the guidelines say, it never does any good and it makes boring reading. It's a perennial weed of offtopicness.
- the topic of the article
- the amount of other people in this thread complaining about patterns and justification for downvoting
- I had been downvoted multiple times for literally asking a perfectly reasonable question (on a topic that one cannot learn by RTFM)
- I am regularly downvoted for asking clarifying questions of people who say things that are clearly not true while implying I am saying things that are in no way reflected in the actual text, or have been chosen "at random" and warned about engaging in flamebait in threads where numerous people are doing the same or worse than me, the primary difference being I often happen to hold a minority opinion, in a discussion about opinions (something an increasing number of people struggle to differentiate from fact)
....I didn't think it seemed all that unreasonable.
I realize I'm not a model forum participant, and I know you have a hectic and thankless job, but I think it's fair to suggest the possibility that ideology plays a bigger role around here than is optimal, and recognize that all people (including you and I) suffer to some degree from ideological filtering in our judgements. HN having guidelines is a fine idea, but might some common behaviors (say, blatant dishonesty) on this site have varying visibility depending on the observer, and have reached a frequency that may be worthy of reasonable guideline modifications in order to maximize quality of discourse?
/rant
I feel quite certain the error message does not match the source code, I suspect it is downvote based, which at times (certain subjects) basically equates to agree with the status quo or be silenced.
Now that I've read further comments in this thread, I now know that rate limiting is manually applied per account, something that afaik has never been explicitly acknowledged before, and is certainly not acknowledged in the deceitful (at least partially) error message: "You're posting too fast".
It's interesting how human judgement of how appropriate/ethical rules and procedures are is often altered by whether or not one is part of the ingroup. In a generic conversation, say on software design principles, I suspect most people would certainly say that objective honesty/correctness is something to strive for, but when the conversation is in this particular implementation, I bet opinions would change.
Another interesting related issue, something one might notice that isn't in the HN guidelines: "Try to be honest; try to speak truthfully." I've suggested this before, but apparently it wasn't deemed important enough, which seems like quite a shame to me because it has become quite a common behavior on HN.
Of course, these things aren't surprising, but they are interesting.
Such a signal is also sent by downvotes without argument, not to mention piling on to a downvoted or flagged comment (people can respond to response to a flagged comment just fine, and can agree with each other about how horrible the flagged person is or what else they probably advocate for, and all that stuff), while that person is rate limited if not shadowbanned.
I can't vote on comments anymore, neither positive nor negative. No clue why, it's been that way since a few months and I stopped caring, just like I wouldn't terribly mind "writing for the showdead community exclusively".
But I know that I upvoted comments that I found reasonable, and unfairly greyed out. So either I was manually selected for that, without any precedent or any communication, or there's an algorithm that blindly removes voting from people who don't agree with the herd enough. Either way, the people who haven't been on the wrong end of the stick much are always super quick to assume that means there's nothing shitty going on. But that has more to do with what people want to believe, not with actually looking into any of it.
Can people actually do that? I have rarely, if ever, seen this on Hacker News, and I feel like anything like this would be a good way to be downvoted or flagged yourself.
> I wouldn't terribly mind "writing for the showdead community exclusively".
You're not alone: there are a number of people who do this already.
> But I know that I upvoted comments that I found reasonable, and unfairly greyed out. So either I was manually selected for that, without any precedent or any communication, or there's an algorithm that blindly removes voting from people who don't agree with the herd enough.
I wonder if this was supposed to be a nudge to use the "vouch" feature instead? Even if it was, it wasn't a particularly good one. Maybe the moderators could tell you why you can't vote if you emailed them?
We're doing it right now, the top level parent comment was dead before I made my first reply to you.
> Maybe the moderators could tell you why you can't vote if you emailed them?
HN could also have a feature that allows mods to communicate with users. I'm not going to use my main email anyway, and making a throwaway email for that is no more "community-like" -- it's just a hoop I don't see any reason for jumping through. Being transparent about moderating, and discussing such things in the open rather than behind closed doors, is a courtesy so basic for my sensibilities I won't beg for it from those who don't give it freely.
Don't bother suggesting innovation in HN, it hasn't been updated in 10+ years, and for some reason they're proud of that fact.
HN is regularly being updated and improved. The ability to vouch for dead comments wasn’t here 10 years ago. Undoing accidental downvotes wasn’t possible. Moderation was much less active back then too, and it shows, detaching comment threads/moderating titles have been two great additions keeping the quality of discussion high even though this place has hundred times the amount of active users as ten years ago (I’m guessing)
No it's not, nor is it growing anywhere near what you guess it's growing at. I'd guess it's stagnant or even dying a bit in 2019.
You have very strong opinions, from the results and status of this thread I think this response is coming from how strongly others are put off by your aggressive defenses and how you're voicing your disagreement with an article or response. (I want aware of Dang before your posts)
The substances on your posts seen very on point, however the tone makes your responses feel personal. I don't like hearing that I'm wrong, combined with a tone where I feel I'm a lesser, stupid, idiot, for having a mistaken brief immediately pushes me defensive. It doesn't matter if I agreed with you initially, if this tone is felt ok the first sentence: I'll never reach your substanive argument for your point to be made. Your responses feel like an attack on Dang not a criticism of HN, this is encouraging others to defend him, and the site, because the principle feeling is a personal attack.
I'm worried that by posting I'll get that same for of response from you.