Hacker News Reader

Comment by semicolonandson | Hacker News Reader

I just finished listening to an engaging series of podcasts by Michael Lewis (author of Flash Boys, The Big Short etc.) about the loss of referees in our society. It's called Against the Rules: https://atrpodcast.com/

Much of reddit still has functioning referees in the form of its moderators, but I'm seeing signs of it cracking — e.g. when I researched the backgrounds of certain moderators I found out that they produced content in some space and would allow their own stuff to get posted while blocking other people's submissions.

View on HN

To me it seems like this is an enternal struggle of /having to be/ a "hipster", and move to the newest services/forums. In the sense that the only untainted grounds will be the ones where there's not that many people yet, or people joining/promoted to influencial positions are scrutinized.

It takes very few bad actors to poison the well. At least on Reddit, there's a myriad of small subreddits which makes it more difficult to infiltrate all of them effectively.

Some issues i think reddit has is that they haven't been great about helping their helpers. I remember toolbox being the only way to moderate properly. It not actually being a tool by reddit itself and a massive resource hog and hampered by the size of the wiki for big subs.

Also reddit not curating the moderatorship of it's big subs unless there's controversy. Making it so the top mod can basically take over, disappear, etc. Basically the tiered nature of mods is an issue imo.

I’m wondering how long it will take for large companies to realize that people are gradually adapting and starting to look for information on sites other than Google search bar.

Today, Google results are a big problem in the sense discussed in the article, there are no more sources of information that can be trusted like in the old days. Some days I reflect with myself trying to figure out how it can be solved…I hope someone ends up finding a solution.

I still for the most part would put site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com into the google search bar. Mostly out of muscle memory, habit, and speed. If I need to use other tools to find something, its because google has failed.

On a similar note, Google deranking Wikipedia (which used to be the first result for like half of my searches) makes it so much less useful. I now need to add wikipedia to my searches.

With DuckDuckGo as your default search, you can use "!w" to direct a search to Wikipedia, "!g" to send it to google, "!gi" for google images, "!a" for amazon, "!ais" for archive.is, and a lot of other options.

If you're using search as a shortcut to get to some other service, it can be nice to go straight there instead of sifting through whatever garbage has been SEOed to the top of Google.

Perhaps more relevant to the GP, you can use !r to search reddit and !hn to search HN:)

Those are two examples where I might not do it because the built-in search on reddit and HN are worse at finding things than searching the same site through Google. For wikipedia search though, no reason to put that through Google.

> I’m wondering how long it will take for large companies to realize that people are gradually adapting and starting to look for information on sites other than Google search bar.

Hopefully it will take them a very long time. I don't want companies to start poisoning online communities with their hidden advertising. When I visit an online community, I want to read about the real thoughts of real people that are hopefully much smarter than I am, and maybe even post a few of my own. No community wants paid members with ulterior motives and conflicts of interest.

I have actually read that some country specific subreddits that are moderated by people who are not from the respective country.

In game communities I've managed there's always a strong desire from the people within the community to become a moderator for IMO the wrong incentives. (wrong being standing out and sometimes power)

I've tried to combat this but it seems very difficult. The thing that works best is to really hide the status and let people make their own ways of standing out.

I also very rarely gave moderator status to anyone who asked. It would mostly be people I see could be a good fit and also make sure there are no obligations to actually use power.

It makes sense if it's not solely that Like r/europe has a Canadian and Brazilian if i remember well to handle night time stuff.

This is a growing concern. There's simply zero transparency, accountability, or ability to verify who is actually moderating these communities.

I'm particularly concerned about political subs, those dealing with hot button issues, and global news. There is zero way to tell if a mod is acting in a potentially alarming manner.

I would expect the majority of the mods are actually advertising accounts of some form or another. The more popular the sub the more likely the mods are not acting in good faith.

This is essentially how imgur got started, banned, then bloomed into popularity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com