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Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

Yea wow, I don't moderate r/askhistorians but rather a different sub, and we sometimes pride ourselves on keeping this relatively clean. But then I stumble across r/askhistorians again and remember that no, no we don't have things under control by comparison.

We can barely keep a lid on the vitriol and toxicity, and some of the more blatantly false/scammy advice. r/askhistorians is a whole 'nother level.

Sometimes I honestly wish hackernews was run more like r/askhistorians. Too many people here on hn talk a lot of shit on stuff they don't really know much about beyond a cursory understanding (I'm probably guilty myself).

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> Sometimes I honestly wish hackernews was run more like r/askhistorians.

I don't. The moderation and voting/karma system on HN is much better than anything seen on Reddit. People have stupid opinions everywhere in life, but this is one of a few rare havens where it's incredibly easy to find deep and interesting conversation. Reddit ain't it.

You should spend some time on r/askhistorians then, because it's very much unlike the rest of reddit. It's not perfect of course, but...

I see more blatantly false armchair comments here at the top of threads loudly proclaiming something that is not correct than I do in r/askhistorians.

I can only tell when it's a topic that I'm actually expert in, so I don't know for sure. But, Gell Mann amnesia...

What do they do well that can be transferred without basically asking the mods to do more work? Isn't it just a manpower thing? Or do they have a way of verifying expertise etc so you know you're getting answers from experts without having to moderate each comment?

> What do they do well that can be transferred without basically asking the mods to do more work?

Nothing

> Isn't it just a manpower thing?

Yes

> Or do they have a way of verifying expertise etc so you know you're getting answers from experts without having to moderate each comment?

Well ok yeah I think they can vet expertise beforehand and then have a smaller list of approved posters, but most of the stuff I suspect just gets sent into the moderation queue requiring more humanpower to deal with.

That's why I say "I wish" heh, it's non practical here

> Too many people here on hn talk a lot of shit on stuff they don't really know much about beyond a cursory understanding

Amen, amen!

Yeah, you're right. HN should allow participation only from people with at least 2 years of education in a Computer Science program.

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