Apparently many people feel like this is not enough, but what more can be done? I can imagine a few policies that would reduce the chance of such comment even appearing, such as:
- Some problematic comments could be instantly removed algorithmically, e.g. by having a list of forbidden substrings/regexps. Trying to avoid that list e.g. by intentional misspelling would result in a manual ban. (And the misspelling would be added to the list.)
- Moderation could be so strict that even a hint of heresy would result in a ban. If you merely seem like a person who probably would say something racist or sexist in the future, let's ban you before you actually do it.
- The values embraced by the website should be expressed by (e.g. anti-racist and anti-sexist) slogans at the top of the page, along with explicit warnings against heresies, so that people would immediately know which opinions are allowed and which are not.
I do not really think any of these suggestions is good. My question is, without them, how can you avoid the situation, apparently very unpleasant to some people, where problematic comments sometimes appear, even if they are soon downvoted/flagged.
(I suspect than a combination of the second and third option is what the author of the article would like to see. But I'd rather hear it explicitly from people who mean it.)
> Apparently many people feel like this is not enough, but what more can be done?
I don't think much more can be done. On a public forum where literally anyone can make an account and post, there's no way to control what content appears, and you can't accurately assess the community by that. The tail of the internet is long, and the bottom of the barrel is deep.
You have to assess the community by how its immune system reacts. It has to be enough if, after a while, the worst comments are downvoted and/or flagged. Unfortunately "after a while" takes time, perhaps several hours, and in the meantime many readers encounter the worst shit before the immune system has gotten to it. Some of those readers are shocked—understandably, because it's shocking shit. Some of them don't understand the dynamics well enough to read the situation accurately—they just think "OMG Hacker News said $SHIT". And some of those take to Twitter and post shocking things, and another scandal cycle repeats. At this point there have been so many scandal cycles that I can at least say that it's second-order trauma to run into them. They used to upset me for days.
If you stop and think about it, it's clear that this is the price for hosting a public forum—there's no way to avoid the shit. The best we can hope for is an ever-improving immune system. HN's immune system—consisting of the community, software, and moderation—at least functions reasonably well, and there's room for it to get better.
It's easy to forget the good side of having a public forum: anyone can show up to post, regardless of who they are or who they know. If they have something interesting to say, they automatically and instantly belong. This is precious. It's how we get magical threads like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676862 (still on the front page), where the founder of a beloved publisher gets to talk to his devoted fans 20 years later.
I don't know if you guys remember, but 6 years ago, just before he handed over HN to us, pg implemented a feature called "pending comments" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304) in which comments were all placed into a queue to be approved of before they would appear in the threads. This is a technical solution that would actually work to prevent the worst shit from appearing here. But it sparked a huge firestorm and the first thing that I did on taking over HN was to roll that back. It was clear that the community didn't want it (not so surprising) but also the social critics of HN, the kind who write articles like the OP or post critiques of HN on Twitter, felt that it was elitist and would put too much power in the hands of entrenched users.
It's not a matter of "not all HN posts", it's a matter of "too many HN posts". And "too many" can be a relatively small number in absolute terms, especially in the context of an industry that has a strong gender imbalance.
But I see far more of them on other platforms, for example in comments sections on news sites.
The fact that the most egregious ones get downvoted quickly here is something that speaks in favor of this community, I would say.