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Comment by rankam | Hacker News Reader

> Here's what a healthy online community has: respect for other members, maturity, empathy, self-awareness, strong moderation, and a diverse enough set of views from participants to make conversations well-rounded and thought provoking.

How do you know this? What data verifies that this is what a healthy online community looks like? Why is strong moderation part of a healthy online community, where strong moderation in a real life would be a signal of unhealthiness (it's censorship)? If an online community is mature, empathetic, and self-aware - why would it require strong moderation?

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Strong moderation in real life occurs all the time, but because the feedback is immediate, behavior modification of the individual generally occurs much faster than online. For example, if someone calls you a derogatory name to your face, you will either disengage or get mad back, both of which providing negative reenforcement for that behavior. Such negative feedback loops exist everywhere in our social communications.

Those are not the sole two options one has available when called a derogatory name. A fun third option is to completely ignore it and demonstrate in that ignorance that you've already won the conversation, which breaks the negative reinforcement you're discussing.

Seriously, next time someone goes after you, try it. Laugh and move on. It's really, really fun to watch what people do in response, because their anger at not landing the desired effect often manifests in physical twitches. Don't give people what they want until it benefits you.

> you will ... disengage

Isn't that what the GP said?

> Why is strong moderation part of a healthy online community

Membership criterion is central to maintaining the competency level of the members. And competency on the topic (along with intellectual honesty) is the single most, perhaps only, important component to a useful discussion: It would be insanely destructive for the New England Journal of Medicine to publish every single thing it ever received with equal weight in massive weekly tomes.

Moderation acts as competency monitoring to a degree.

The problem with literal membership is that it precludes autodidacts, people new to the field and people who can't be bothered with a complicated process for joining. Thus unrestricted membership with moderation. And indeed on reddit, the highest quality subreddit, /r/science, is the one most aggressively moderated

For fact based, purpose driven venues, if you believe you were censored because of your opinion, you should not have posted an opinion in the first place. That's certainly how it works in the workplace which is how some people need to use the web.

There can be unlimited venues where partially informed people post their opinions, maybe we can call them "healthy" or not. But some people want to work on problems that actually do require knowledge and should not have to have their discussions constantly vandalized. A "functional" venue one might say.

And indeed on reddit, the highest quality subreddit, /r/science, is the one most aggressively moderated

Although IMHO their extreme stance on moderation is not always a good thing. For example, they have an unwritten (at least, the last time I checked) policy of nuking entire threads where there are some poor comments, even if this also results in deleting many useful comments later in the same thread.

The first time I contributed substantially to a discussion in /r/science, on a subject where I did have something resembling an expert opinion to offer, my entire contribution (which took several hours to write across a handful of comments, with carefully backed sources etc.) was summarily deleted without warning. I queried this with the mods, and they explained the policy about nuking entire threads. Given the nature of some of the early comments around that thread, I couldn't disagree with the assessment that they were not a constructive contribution. However, I also immediately filed the whole sub in the same dustbin as SO and have made no further attempts to contribute, for much the same reasons.

> If an online community is mature, empathetic, and self-aware - why would it require strong moderation

First off I think you make a point. However, the reason I think strong moderation is still required, even if those previous qualifiers are met, is that online communities are generally built off of focus on some shared interest. Real flesh and blood people, even if they are mature and empathetic etc, will invariably have a variety of passions some of which may conflict with the focus of the community.

If a passion that conflicts with the focus surfaces in a discussion it may _ignite_ that passion among a subset of the members of the community. This causes conversation to derail, the community loses focus, and the members abandon the forum. Strong moderation keeps the community focused, and for that reason the community thrives and is "healthy".

Moderation isn't necessarily censorship.

Think of the evening news on TV. You have half an hour to fill, you are going to have to pick the most relevant things. Some things will make the cut, some won't.

Once you get to 24 hours news then it is another thing, because they are repeating the same 15 minutes over and over again. The model to describe that is not censorship, it is spam, electronic warfare, jamming -- an entirely disingenuous communication that superficially looks like "speech" but has nothing to do with "free speech" and such. In fact, it inhibits real communication the same way weed killer kills plants.

Online isn't the evening news or a 24 hour news station - I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. HN doesn't only moderate so that the "best" content makes it to the top, they also moderate (censor) certain topics - you don't see a lot about politics on HN because they don't want those subjects discussed on the HN platform.

That is his definition of a healthy community. This is the question asked by the OP.

See their first paragraph for how.

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