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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

I’d just like to take a moment to say how much I appreciate HN and all the work put in by dang and the moderation team. Everyone here really cares about keeping discussions lively and respectful. This is a wonderful community to be a part of!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

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Strongly agree. I'm deeply disappointed with the depth of discourse in other internet communities which implement upvoting; the highest voted comments are usually shallow hot takes or low-effort jokes. However, on HN the most substantial and interesting comments are the ones that typically find their way to the top of the discussion. I can't remember the last time I ever learned anything new and interesting from any other social media site, whereas the HN community continuously offers a wealth of deliberately considered perspectives.

Major thanks to the HN community and those who keep it running!

Agreed. Kinda makes you wonder why other communities haven’t been able to reproduce the level of quality and civility (I know HN is still far from perfect, but night and day vs. other platforms).

A great community to be a part of, and much appreciation to those that oversee and contribute to the high quality and respectful discussions.

There are lots of specific things one could mention - moderation, text focus, down voting, etc, but I think unfortunately the big differentiator is that (as far as I know) HN doesn't make money.

Rather, the way HN makes money (helping YC founders advertise and hire) are aligned with the interests of the community.

Downvoting, which on the surface seems less civil, leads to more civil discussions. Just my opinion of course...

Happy Holidays! I second the gratitude for all the work by dang and the rest of the HN team. Well done and thank you!

I was almost tempted to downvote this. But I disagree with you, so I won't.

I think the fact that the primary topics here are niche and therefore self selecting plays a big role - vs. open platforms (Reddit) that are not only much larger but low effort discovery wise. For me car forums still have that sense of community that is here as well, albeit a completely different topic and a vestige of the 00s design-wise.

On HN there's the process of shadowbanning entire users accounts.

By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too.

Since I was a teenager, in the vBulletin v3+ forums era, I've wanted to develop an access control / rate limiting system where moderators would be responsible for categorizing posts depending on the contents of the submitted posts and the user who created them.

When an account has an established history, we nearly always tell them we're banning them and why:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

We only use shadowbanning when an account is new and shows signs of spamming, trolling, or serial abuse.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

> By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too.

That's why we added the vouching feature many years ago: so users can identify and restore the valuable comments made by banned accounts. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch.

There’s no shortage of constructive/valuable content by people who don’t also regularly spam or troll, they likely stick around _because_ the low-value commenters get shadowbanned.

> By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too.

That's why showdead is great! (The checkbox in your profile to unhide flagged and other 'killed' posts.) Not clear on if it unhides IP banned posters though. And I would like to try a forum that let you toggle it by category (IIUC Slashdot has post categories, though it peaked before my time and I don't know if they're used for that).

I regularly "report" behaving shadowbanned people. If someone has gone a while only saying productive things, the system unbans them.

On the other hand, I'm surprised how profilic certain people are. They get absolutely no feedback, but will go around trolling people several times a day.

We have to unban accounts manually, though users of course can still vouch for their comments in the meantime, which is basically a per-post unban mechanism.

If anyone notices an account that is banned that shouldn't be banned, they're welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want anyone to be banned if they've fixed whatever the original issue was and are abiding by the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

I think the biggest thing is size. HN is "big" but also the size of a large subreddit in terms of users.

All quality internet communities I've ever seen start with strong moderation. Everything else is secondary.

As someone who has moderated forums in the past, I 100% concur that I don't know that HN is what it is without dang. And I also still can't fully wrap my mind around how he and the team have been able to guardrail the discourse to keep it as high quality as it is...especially over the last few years.

It's insanely impressive, and I'm incredibly grateful that this community exists.

I kind of agree with this. It’s like I have my grievances with the HN community, and I think there are times where articles get flagged because they are of a certain bent, but mostly it is surprisingly fair.

I’ve been (rightly) chastised by dang, though generally I try not to troll. (Sorry to those I’ve been a troll too)

For the most part I don’t know a better place to have discussions of the kind you can have here.

Happy holidays, and Merry Christmas if you’re so inclined, and a happy new year!

> I’ve been (rightly) chastised by dang, though generally I try not to troll. (Sorry to those I’ve been a troll too)

Preach. Same here. Took me a while to fit in but dang was always correct in his rebukes to me.

HN is my favorite daily read, the incredible amount of knowledge gained through this site has been one of the greatest gifts which I get to enjoy every day!

Happy Holidays!

Absolutely true, and a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone here!

Same to you!

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