Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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I'm seconding your suggestion. I also think it's mostly moderation.

Through close to two decades of watching and participating in discussions on Reddit, HN, Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, YouTube comments, some phpBB boards, website comment systems, as well as a bunch of local discussion boards in the age before social media, I've observed that:

- Niche forums fare better than general ones

- Voting systems don't matter at all, including pseudo-voting like "likes" and "shares" counters

- Real name policy doesn't matter

- Heavy active moderation - i.e. with moderators being part of the community - seems to be the deciding factor

- Passive moderation, like e.g. "report" buttons on Facebook/YouTube, does not work

It is my current belief that the only way to maintain quality discussion in a community is to:

1. Define a quality standard, e.g. through a set of guidelines, and

2. Have moderation that continuously and timely enforces everyone's adherence to the standard.

Nothing else matters.

People don't have one fixed mode of communication - they can't be divided into groups like "idiots", "assholes" and "quality contributors". Individuals may habitually prefer some styles, but they also naturally mimic other people, and ultimately always adapt to boundaries of what's allowed. Culture then grows around those boundaries, further influencing people through mimicry.

A person that's a total asshole on YouTube can also be very professional at work, and polite to their friends. A person that's communicating constructively on HN may do the opposite on Twitter. In all these cases, the enforced standards differ.

Guidelines aren't standards if they aren't actually enforced, and moderation doesn't bring quality if it's not moderating for it.

> - Voting systems don't matter at all, including pseudo-voting like "likes" and "shares" counters

I'm a little torn on this. I can see them as useful or damaging. I quite like HNs which doesn't support the chasing of karma per comment too precisely. Not perfect, but none of the solutions are really.

> A person that's a total asshole on YouTube can also be very professional at work, and polite to their friends. A person that's communicating constructively on HN may do the opposite on Twitter. In all these cases, the enforced standards differ.

Indeed, I know I write very differently here to reddit, and differently on different subs. Just as in real life.

The timely side is I think very important, as this keeps the overall view of the place looking as you want it. On that side, I think rapid deletion is a very useful tool.

Something I liked about the casualuk approach is that there's a fast forgiveness as well. A one day ban and comment deletion is simple, obviously impactful but not actually harmful and there's no long lasting "negative" score for people to aim for (or feel like it means they become outcasts).

Moderation has its problems, and maybe there's a better approach, but it's much harder to "game" an active person with a stake in keeping a place nice.

I actually have even stronger opinion: moderation also doesn't work, but it seems pretty much the only way to slow decay. For example niche forums fare better in particular because moderation is easier with smaller forums and they generally decay anyway as the forum itself grows. And I don't think the moderation skill is learnable either; I (painfully) learned that the founder is rarely a good moderator.

The one counter-example I can think of for that is https://forums.rpg.net - it's quite a large community, and has been around for something like 20 years. The moderators are very active in the forums themselves, and they've learned from their experiences over time. It's not perfect, but as the community is still large and thriving, even in the Reddit/Facebook/Twitter era, I'd say they're doing a good job.

I mean, there are of course good moderators (I've surely seen some), but unless they already happen to exist in the community it is extremely hard to put good moderators to the existing community. It is even harder to discover good moderators anyway.

For good moderation, the moderators have to care about their work. This is a hard problem in life in general - people tend to care on things that affect them directly, or as a part of their value system. In small groups it's easy to find organic caring.

We've scaled up civilization by replacing the need for organic care with money. The need for money provides the "affects them directly" part[0], and job requirements provide the "value system" part. Unfortunately, having people do the work for money, instead of for the output of their work, introduces all kinds of well-known problems that plague us.

All this means that, to provide good moderation for a community, you have to either:

- Find moderators within the community, who already care about its health, or

- find people within the community who care about it and have money, to draft moderation standards, hire paid moderators to enforce those standards, and then police the moderators so that they're actually doing their jobs properly.

I think very large communities can work only if they're applying either method #2, or become subdivided into small enough sub-communities that method #1 can be applied.

(There's also a third method: start a religion. It's the other tried and true method of maintaining a system of values in a society. But it's tricky to pull off, and stops working when the group grows too large.)

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[0] - Which is why some people are worried that basic income could collapse civilization. As it is, most value in society is provided by jobs into which people are coerced by their precarious economic situation.

Heavy moderation (/r/askhistorians) and niche (this forum?) for sure help, but they are not the solution for the most "public" and mainstream places like comments under posts on BBC's Facebook page.

And the toxic polarising discussion in those mainstream places is the one that threatens all of our societies the most. Disciplining a RuneScape phpBB board is trivial in comparison.

> Heavy moderation (/r/askhistorians) and niche (this forum?)

I'd consider these two to be both niche and heavily moderated: history is a niche topic too, and HN is heavily moderated.

> they are not the solution for the most "public" and mainstream places like comments under posts on BBC's Facebook page

I think heavy moderation is a solution, probably the only solution. But these places would have to implement it first. Moderation doesn't scale, and companies like Facebook only want to do the things that scale. Their toxicity problem is self-inflicted - they don't want to pay for what's needed to solve it. See my tangent in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917473.

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