The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

newyorker.com

292 pointsnicolast245 comments

Question for the mods:

In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

But I’ve seen more types of TV news stories going through, like stories about political protests, stories about politics in Eastern Europe, free speech debates, etc.

Without getting into the details of each particular submission I’m curious if you think the submission standards have remained consistent throughout the years or if your curation philosophy has changed at all and if so, in what ways?

P.S. Thanks for all you do as mods and for making HN an a valuable and unique community. It’s awesome to go to a thread and see helpful links or comments that enhance the conversation.

It's very hard to define specific political content as separate from technology.

I remember a single Covid scientific paper turning into a 500 post political discussion.

Or tech giants and censorship and privacy. How does one separate tech from politics in this sense?

Maybe society has become more political and it's making it's way to link aggregator sites?

I think it is more that tech (and tech companies) become more subjects of political debate.

People want to debate politics, but submissions about politics get killed. Therefore people end up using any excuse to debate politics in any thread.

I see tons of threads without political debate. I actually think the majority of threads are not political.

Still better than being unregulated.

I don't come here to have political discussion, I want to find out what's interesting in tech, not to engage in flame wars (except the vim/emacs kind, that I fight).

Are there subjects of political debate that aren't political?

the reality is that almost everything has an element of politics and it is good to understand the relationship between politics and technology in particular. Tech, in many ways, has been adept at skirting existing laws because tech transcends barriers that were show-stoppers in the past. AirBnB, Uber are good examples. Google, facebook and spying. Clearview and their immoral data gathering.

There is the additional issue that tech has crept into everything and the internet is where modern state-sponsored disinformation and misinformation campaigns are being fought.

Tech is maturing and a consequence of that process is that politics develops. It's not necessarily a bad thing as the cynics say.

I think it makes sense that more political discussions occur on hacker News because tech and the world in general possibly is becoming more political.

Technology is used as political tools/weapons to drive and manufacture consent, through promoting hate and creating divisiveness - and through captured mainstream media channels, and online platforms; this couldn't be any more obvious with Trudeau's behaviours and observing the mainstream landscape of what the majority of Canadians are seeing.

And so you're correct - politics and technology is intertwined, but HN is happy to suppress conversation that would arguably lead to discussing technological solutions.

The biggest problem is our information distribution/propagation (and therefore trust) apparatus is corrupted, which does include the issue with low-to-no-effort downvotes allowing a person to suppress content while getting rewarded via a dopamine hit.

You're preaching to the choir here about mainstream media being super corrupt.

Puts a lot of pressure on one or two hacker news mods to be the purveyors of neutrality for the entire media landscape if that's what's expected.

Tech and political ideologies have collapsed, and especially in areas of interest to HN. Climate change, when a fetus is a baby, etc... these are areas where science has intersected politics before HN existed, but they also don't intersect HN regularly.

But now some of the hot topics in tech are also hot topics in politics-- privacy and mass surveillance, platform censorship, vaccinations/medicine(which were a little political, became super political), affirmitive action in the tech industry, etc...

I don't know if we'll ever go back to where we were as tech plays a larger and larger role. And if you think we're intertwined now, just wait until the metaverse!

Eternal September maybe?

As someone that's been here since the very beginning I think that tech has begun to be responsible for a larger portion of the world as a whole and this community has moved a small amount towards that direction as a result.

I distinctly remember reading articles about major world events in the beginning as well so it's not entirely new, but it has grown a little.

I don't think it's a problem, and this is coming from a centrist that typically doesn't care for political discussion on any medium.

As one of the people who thinks that more (too much more) political content has crept in here, I will say that I agree with you on the above. That is, I agree that it is becoming harder (albeit not impossible!) to disambiguate what is "tech" versus what is "politics" when it comes to things like the discussions around, eg "social media's affect on society" and etc.

And to be fair, talking about tech has always tended to lead to a certain amount of political discussion, especially in terms of things like encryption policy, DRM, etc. So even I wouldn't try to say we should have zero political content here. But it does seem like it's grown a bit more prevalent than I'd prefer.

I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy.

History (particularly twentieth-century history) is caked in the blood of people killed by technologies that were originally conceived of by people pursuing what they thought was innocent (or, at least, amoral) knowledge. The Pugwash conference (https://pugwash.org/) grew from the need of those who built the atom bomb to wrangle the ramifications of their technology.

A hacker without ethics is a terrible risk. We should have discourse on the human side of what we do.

I don't disagree. And if somebody started a forum dedicated to "the social implications of technology" I'd probably join and participate (some). But TBH, when I come to HN, I'm more interested in "Check out this cool new Erlang library" or "Why Go should or should not have generics", or "1001 Neat Regex Tricks" and such-like, than the more political stuff.

Maybe, for me, that's a reaction to the amount of time I spend on politics in the rest of my life. I'm politically active enough to the point that I've run for public office before, and spend a not small amount of time discussing public policy in other forums. So I guess I would prefer to find HN a bit of a refuge from that stuff. Of course I understand that other people have a different experience and will therefore feel differently about the "correct" amount of politics on HN.

Everybody who still thinks real-world moral and, hence, political concerns are somehow separable from hacker interests needs to see Allison Parrish's "Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic" talk (or read the transcript) before posting: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...

Everybody who still thinks real-world moral and, hence, political concerns are somehow separable from hacker interests

Please note that I'm making no such claim. I would just prefer to discuss the intersection of "real-world moral and, hence, political concerns" and "hacker interests" either A. less often and/or B. somewhere else.

We tend to reserve the word "tech" for new technology especially. Cars, power tools and horse wagons were also new sexy technology once upon a time, but no-one calls companies making those products "tech companies". The categorization from "tech" to "normal stuff" happens when a technology becomes ubiquitous part of our society rather than play stuff of early adopters and hackers. Arguably this has recently happened also to social media, internet advertising and many other internet technologies so maybe we should move on and recategorize those things as what they are instead of "tech".

So what is "tech" now, if we take the definition to be "new technology not yet widely adopted by everyone's grandmother"? Maybe some of the blockchain stuff? Nuclear fusion? Reinforcement learning based AI agents? Self-driving cars? Hyperloop? Homomorphic encryption? Nerve implants? Robots capable of moving in unpredictable environments (like Boston Dynamics has)? Artificial meat? Space ships?

No, this is not simply a change in the way we use the term. Literally it’s that software itself is used in more fields to do more things in 2022 than it was in 2007.

"Cars, power tools and horse wagons were also new sexy technology once upon a time, but no-one calls companies making those products "tech companies"

I think I have heard Tesla to be described as a tech company, once or twice. And with Bosch, my favourite power tool company, the same. I mean I am not a english speaker, but it would be really news to me, that "tech company" is defined as "brand new tech".

> talking about tech has always tended to lead to a certain amount of political discussion, especially in terms of things like encryption policy, DRM, etc.

Growing up in the era of peak Slashdot it was hard not to view politics through the lens of technology. There were politicians trying to take away my games, and restrict my speech, and put me in jail for downloading MP3s. Fighting those battles through the years has definitely formed my political views.

Yep, same here. So yeah, definitely not arguing for a total separation of "tech" and "politics". That's probably not possible. But I do wish HN could move away from the more generic "politics with a tenuous (at best) connection to tech" and "general world news" stuff a bit.

I think "political" content being so heavily suppressed is the community abdicating responsibility; and also is a sign of how much users here aren't able to emotionally regulate to have civil conversation [which is a signal of strength, of health - physical and mental health, mastery of oneself, self-control] - so much practically everything important - including the Emergency Act (war measures act aka martial law) being initiated in Canada for the first time ever by our Prime Minister who is more and more clearly acting as a fascist.

When I tried posting a technology angle to this - "Ask HN: Do we care about our captured systems?" - to point out that it's the design of platforms like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc. that's allowing propaganda and ideology to easily get to the top, while easily suppressing the truth - and where on HN it's easy to suppress perfectly valid, well-written, articulate comments to prevent the majority from seeing ideas that may actually be the truth.

It's a problem.

Edit to add: Thanks for all the fish, enjoy your lazy dopamine hit.

I think "political" content being so heavily suppressed is the community abdicating responsibility;

Presumably every single member of this community is also a member of one or more other communities, some of which have an overt intention to be "more political". Given that, no one is being denied an outlet to share their views, give input, discuss, influence, vote, etc. when it comes to political events. So what is it so particularly important that this community be "political" (I'll just hand wave around exactly what we mean by "political" for now, for the sake of discussion)?

Personally I come here (mainly) to hear about / discuss obscure programming libraries, new programming languages, startup strategies, new scientific breakthroughs, etc. I get enough of "general politics" and "world news" elsewhere... I'd really rather not see it here as well. But, that's just me.

> So what is it so particularly important that this community be "political" (I'll just hand wave around exactly what we mean by "political" for now, for the sake of discussion)?

My opinion: because here you can find arguably the highest concentration of powerful and knowledgeable minds, and this is the sort of thing that the world needs working on these hard problems.

I find the concern over serious issues that is often expressed here to be rather disingenuous, as people love to engage in bitch sessions about the bad behavior of the members of their outgroups, but the notion that we should consider rising above that level of behavior and think about trying to find actual solutions is somehow ~inappropriate, as this is a place only for "curious conversation" (except for the exceptions to that rule, of course).

Exactly.

I know HN and dang aren't going to change, they're conservative let's say, and Twitter and Reddit aren't going to change either - and so I am working towards my own solution that I think will allow for adequate moderation and discussion management. I've had 5 years of severe chronic pain, only recently had a surgery that reduced my remaining pain by 25%+ and the specialist was finally able to diagnose 2 other nerve compression syndromes I have, and after those surgeries I believe I'll be able to go full speed ahead with my plans. I'll probably only do a "Show HN" in a year from now, but if you're interested in joining it earlier/once very basic MVP is launched and giving feedback I'd appreciate it; matt@engn.com

> I know HN and dang aren't going to change, they're conservative let's say

I'm not quite sure what people "are", but that there is some sort of a fundamental (and I think unrealized problem) seems unmistakable to me. And I agree that they can't change on their own, but I don't believe that change cannot be coerced - at least, it is highly speculative.

> so I am working towards my own solution that I think will allow for adequate moderation and discussion management.

I am very interested, as I have been working on the same thing (but only conceptually so far), I will send you an email.

Or it may that this community is international, so you either have tech talks, or a pile of discussions about politics in every part of the world.

Not really, there's still the rule of "new phenomenon" that makes it news/discussion worthy - like Canada's quick turn towards fascism, tyranny.

interesting new phenomenon that satisfies intellectual curiosity.

And by interesting - anything good hackers would find interesting.

It's a purposely high bar to filter out almost all mainstream news and even most tech news, and definitely most politics, which tends to satisfy emotional curiosity at the expense of intellect.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work. These stories tend to brute-force their way in.

Because there may be more emotion involved doesn't negate its intellectual value - that's a scapegoat reason, and people avoiding intellectual interests that have emotion involved is avoiding learning and opportunities to learn. That's arguably quite detrimental to society, and "hackers" avoiding it who have domain expertise with technology and maybe could provide a unique perspective or brainstorm uniquely is then likely reduced. Arguably political issues, policy and information propagation are the main problems we have in society these days.

And why exactly Canada's turn is more intresting than, for example, Ukraine and Russia on a brink on war? I live in country, which for the last 7 years made a sharp turn towards rather literal authoritarism, but probably due to the issue being localised to Europe, not North America no one here would be fighting for the topic to be on the front page. Also, there are thousands of places create to discuss local and global events, less to discuss obscure IT topics.

I've never seen an online community improved by more object-level political discussion.

Maybe this avoidance by problem solving engineers is part of the problem?

Politics and technology is intertwined, but HN is happy to suppress conversation that would arguably lead to discussing technological solutions.

How far back do you consider the "old days"?

In the decade-plus I've been around, there has always been a small but steady stream of nontech political content. Despite the policy. My perception is that hasn't increased or decreased, though it does have periodic surges (say, US election season). I personally think it adds to the appeal of HN - in moderation, of course. Political conversations here are generally better informed and more polite than they are in other places, and I tend to learn more than I would by solely reading formal news sources.

Another thing people might not realize is that a lot of political comments die. With showdead enabled, you can see all sorts of junk that sounds more like the comment sections on political sites. Short comments that parrot the same talking points seen on TV die rather quickly.

I don't see political posts here getting traction very often. The ones that do usually are angled towards the community (anytime censorship bills come up, you get 500+ comment HN threads). Meanwhile, browsing the new section I found that articles that are just blatantly political ("you won't believe what AOC did in Florida!" to make up a title), often linger with few comments and votes.

And even in those rare political posts I find, the discourse is very different from other places. I think that boils down to the golden rule of comments: "thoughtful and substantive". I've noticed the culture of HN is to downvote any comment that does not adhere to this rule, regardless of whether you agree with it or not. Even in comments I've posted about China that ended with a sentence about how I disliked the leader got knocked for being counterproductive.

At the end of the day, you can have the most frought and divisive thread here and the comments are going to all be far more civil and thoughful than on Reddit or Facebook because even thought everyone might be up in arms, all of them are going "well I'll show them! types long thoughtful comment that addresses everyone's grievances"

> Even in comments I've posted about China that ended with a sentence about how I disliked the leader got knocked for being counterproductive.

I think one issue with approach by up/down voters is that sometimes the "thoughtful and substantive" thing to say is inherently ideological, and I notice that being explicitly ideological (for example, making it clear that you regard a long term trend in the economy as serving the interests of a particular group of people) is viewed as counterproductive.

This mirrors a dilemma out in the "real world" where people find it hard to bring up substantive political ideas because just doing that is viewed as divisive and antagonistic. Unfortunately, sometimes (maybe even often) this is actually what is required to have "thoughtful and substantive" discussions.

I would not say they are more polite. they get heated here like anywhere else. I have noticed a lot of green accounts, I think people are using second accounts to post stuff that they do not with to tie to their main account.

I don't mind the political discussions coming through as long as they don't dominate the front page.

However, I am saddened with the diminishing engagement with actual hard tech stories (not tech opinion pieces) that reach the front page. Lately, it seems like links to stories about people doing cool software or hardware things with complete write-ups can barely muster enough upvotes to stay on the front page very long, if at all. The comments occasionally yield some fun further discussions, but not like they did 5+ years ago on HN. It seems the interests of the average HN upvoter (who ultimately shapes what we see on the front page) are shifting more toward the political and controversy type pieces.

This is an interesting point, it would be cool if HN allowed arbitrary hidden tags to be added by users.

By definition, as the site becomes more popular, more obscure technologies/projects will be pushed to the edges, especially when it comes to the front page.

Having a more robust search and tagging system would help with that, it’s analogous to how Reddit had to move to a vast number of sub-Reddit‘s once it got popular.

Everyone wants to talk, no one wants to listen.

But it’s pretty obvious on “hard tech stories” that few people have the knowledge to meaningfully contribute.

As I get older, the saying “it’s better to remain quiet and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt” resonates more and more.

On the other hand, it is difficult to learn anything if you are unwilling to make mistakes, that is, to be thought a fool sometimes. And on the gripping hand, I find that intentionally asserting something you think might be wrong in an effort to provoke someone into correcting you is often much more effective than asking a question.

You can use the classic frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

It uses the same algorithm, but only counts upvotes from accounts created before 2012 (iirc).

EDIT: I was slightly off, the deadline is 2008: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...

I was expecting that to be markedly different from the current front page but it looks very similar to me.

IMO, it's because it's easy to understand and upvote non-tech stories compared to actual tech discussion. Even if you're a technical person, the article may be about a niche on the opposite side of the industry from where your knowledge lies, so you can't parse whether it's brilliant or nonsense. Non-tech stories are typically much easier to form opinions over, for better and worse.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

Good luck with that. One person’s apolitical feel good story is a nefarious propaganda piece in another person’s eyes.

(Interpreting “about politics” to also encompass “political”.)

There was a change a while back that made the front page less volatile, around that time you started seeing stories merged more often, and traditional news creeping in a bit more. I think it is sort of like a lightning rod to keep the rest of the front page pure. Before that stories would show up and get flagged constantly, and the front page would change multiple times an hour.

One thing that I have noticed is that 2020 was a bit of an eternal september for hn. Many times I see people posting things that don't really seem to work with the hn style, but they have a fairly high karma count and an account that was created in or after 2020. I think maybe a bunch of people suddenly working from home felt safe to use the internet without a boss over their shoulder, and needed a bit of community they were missing from not going in the office. This influx has watered down the ability of hn to aggressively flag/downvote politics, dumb jokes, etc.

Though, all in all it's still mostly the same it has been in the last 10 years or so.

I think it's quite different now, the gap between HN and lobste.rs content is growing wider and wider, lobste.rs to me represents more closely what "old" HN was like

I'm still annoyed I couldn't find someone I knew to give me an invite to lobste.rs 9 years ago. I remember asking former coworkers, and people at local tech meetups, and getting blank stares like I was making something up. Though I suppose that is how they managed to keep things under control

I've noticed that same increase in Reddit-style one-liner jokes and references here too. Not enough to become a problem yet, but just enough to worry about setting precedent for more. One good one-liner in a thread can be alright, but it tends to attract a train of similar low-content responses.

I hadn't connected that to a pandemic-induced demand increase, but that could well be true.

As for submissions (rather than comments), it does feel like HN has shifted more towards broader industry and politics news, rather than just tech and programming. I'm okay with this, in fact HN has displaced Reddit for me thanks to the much higher standard of discourse, although I do worry a bit about marginalizing the crunchy tech content for those who come here for that.

> I've noticed that same increase in Reddit-style one-liner jokes and references here too.

I think the guidelines might be right, in that this hasn't really seemed to change in the ~10 years I've been here.

Would you consider, for example, Musk moving to Texas, or that same state's power grid failing to be political stories?

Both these ostensibly tech-related stories have strong political undercurrents.

>In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed.

In the old days, politics and world news were not as intertwined with technology as they are today.

If there is a greater incidence of seemingly off-topic (politics, crime, or sports) submissions, it's likely correlated to the fact that tech is more and more inseparable from everyday life and policy decisions, and vice versa. One of my favorite memories from early 2020 HN was someone angrily asking why stories about Covid-19 were making the front page, as if they couldn't imagine how a potential pandemic might deeply affect the tech sector.

I "think", most of those debate ties with technology one way or another. Say Joe Rogan's issue may not have been allowed on HN if it wasn't for Spotify.

And more broadly speaking, what are the roles of technology in an extremely political sensitive climate. Should Telegram do A or B, and what about Whatsapp, Facebook moderation, Apple App Store disallow certain group, is that a curation problem or a political problem? Fake News, Yellow Journalism, none of these are "new". But now they happen on Tech rather than traditional media, is that a tech problem or a political problem? We just dont have any concrete answer.

There are other Geopolitics issues. I mean if WW3 did start surely that is important enough for HN submission. Or China decide to invade Taiwan, so to speak. Surely the threat of TSMC Foundry supply is important enough for submission even if the article itself doesn't mention TSMC.

So while the rule is not black and white as zero politics discussions. I think the moderation is fairly consistent. Still dont know how Dang manages it. To the point I sometimes worry about him leaving YC, and HN may never be the same again.

inb4 HN stories about Canadian truckers are just gorilla advertising for self-driving trucks! New marketing slogan: "Self-driving truck don't need to get vaccine" /s

Even there many of the stories have been about tech company involvement; GoFundMe, data leaks, social media bans, etc.

Canadas moves on bank accounts and how that ties to crypto robustness is already being discussed :)

Guerrilla.

The last time I saw a promotional sidewalk character in action frantically waving his signage, has was in an actual gorilla costume, not revolutionary but that's advertising.

> I "think", most of those debate ties with technology one way or another.

I feel that, if this is the reasoning it's becoming more prevalent, then it should be reeled in a bit. Politically charged topics seem to rarely bring in good-faith discussion I have come to expect from HN.

They are easy to avoid howerver. Not participating in them and upvoting other contents solve the issue at least for yourself.

I do avoid them, but they tend to crowd the front page where I feel like other topics that are more interesting and on topic for the site get left on pages 2-4, not seeing nearly as much interaction as they would have otherwise.

Yup. This is the answer. If something political is posted its one of many items on the front page. Ignore it and upvote content you find interesting. Even better browse new posts instead of only the front or first few pages.

> Even better browse new posts instead of only the front or first few pages.

Yes! No story makes it to the front page unless enough people upvote it on the "new" page. Thus, upvoting a new a story gives you much more editorial influence over the contents of the front page than upvoting a story that has already made it there. (And it takes fewer people to flag away an off-topic story while it's still new.)

Another perspective: By browsing the front page, you're looking at stories that other HN readers find interesting. By reading the "new" page, you have the ability to promote stories that you think are interesting.

Incorrect. This is what we were told about Reddit as we watched it become basically unusable as a platform. Voting alone isn’t a proper way to guarantee quality discussion (the opposite actually.)

True, but whatever mechanism takes its place must contend with the fact that users vary in the extent they: 1) actively think of the larger community vs. themselves as a member; and 2) derive individual esteem from it.

As an example, the karma system at Reddit looks fine on paper relative to #1, but #2 is what created the phenomenon of meandering threads full of single phrase bad puns. The users are converging on a local maximum gain of esteem via upvotes, per unit of effort as measured by post length.

Reddit is essentially the only platform left, which makes it a difficult example of an unusable one. I think it's actually gotten so big that its old problems (every reply being the same joke) were solved by having new users voting that don't all like the same jokes.

This sort of reminds me of what happened to the Slashdot... everyone was playing video games, hacking with Arduinos, doing silly things with homelabs, arguing about OS X vs. Linux, etc. and then suddenly so many people in the community moved up through the ranks and started to interface with politics, policy, and international business, just as those things started to really change with tech. So ya, tech overflows itself.

In light of this pretty natural scope creep, I agree with the above point that the moderation feels pretty consistent, and am, for one, extremely appreciative of Dang's work.

I think slashdot went down with users when they introduced the massively unpopular "web 2.0" redesign. It was unusable in that layout and they never reverted it back. I think the only users there are the ones using the old layout and know how to turn it on.

Shame really as it it was the best automoderated system I've ever seen.

I'm replying for my own self-history ;

Slashdot was also a heavily BOFH type of site...

If you broke from the narrative, you were massively attacked...

That said, I was a very early user in /. - so much so that some of the prominent users I hired as linux tech consultants prior to LinuxCare... (long story and ego-s begone)

/. waned in my regular internet consumption though...

We should be stricter with requiring a genuine technical connection. “Has a podcast on Spotify” or “fundraised through GoFundMe” don’t count. Journalists throw in recognizable names whenever possible because they get clicks, even though the topic is completely non-technical.

Or even (non-political) articles like "some web site got hacked" or "a Tesla crashed somewhere" or "web site X is down". Unless there's real technical detail in such a story (which there hardly ever is when the story first comes out), it doesn't encourage meaningful discussion, only baseless speculation about what might have happened.

> I "think", most of those debate ties with technology one way or another.

Nah. Yesterday's political topic (there's almost always at least one per day) was about the WWII Tokyo firebombing.

I think the real answer is even simpler: I think dang (or whoever is on duty that day) asks themselves "is this topic going to lead to an interesting conversation, or will it devolve into a shitshow?" Shitshows generally get canned, no matter the subject. It's benign dictatorship at work.

I "think" you both are missing the point of HN ;

HN, to me (and I am long in the tooth on this site), is about that which is fascinating to the mind, with a culture of good, meaningful content which is relevant to said minds...

Politics permeate our lives - and especially moreso now. (FB was never a thought re politics when it was born, but it has so much mindshare now that its inexcusable to not think of FB as a political force (even though its literally a revolving door with government security apparatai)

Also, @Dang is a fucking bad-ass... He is probably the best mod I have ever encountered...

He has on multiple occasions put me in my place, gently, as I tend to post heavy handed comments when drunk and we have gone at it and agreed about when we both posted drunken rage comments...

Yet @Dang ALWAYS replies to my emails and helps me when I ask for it...

I've been on HN/YC for a long time -- @Dang has never failed being just an awesome mod of this forum.

---

The culture of HN posting is golden, thus far, and this forum is something to be protected. @Dang needs a mod protege to take the reigns when he decides to go live his fuck-you money on an island.

> was about the WWII Tokyo firebombing

My opinion is that as a topic belongs to "History" rather than politics. But I understand why people might disagree. I mean even my reply above is getting a lot of upvoted and downvoted at the moment.

But I do agree with the interesting conversation and shitshow being the simpler answer.

> I think the real answer is even simpler: I think dang (or whoever is on duty that day) asks themselves "is this topic going to lead to an interesting conversation, or will it devolve into a shitshow?" Shitshows generally get canned, no matter the subject. It's benign dictatorship at work.

You're not wrong, I suspect....but as always, I am fascinated by how Dang and most people here seem to have utterly no curiosity about why the big brains at HN News re unable to engage in conversation about ~politics without it melting down into chaos like you'd find on most any other forum.

We often have these "serious" discussions about the dangers of climate change, fake news, etc, how it's super duper important that humanity gets its shit together, but is humans being able to communicate with each other in a skillful manner about difficult topics not plausibly a prerequisite for accomplishing these things that we talk about humanity "must" do? And if we not only can't do it, but refuse to even consider discussing the matter, then what shall become of the world?

I have been sternly warned about this message before, which I believe illustrates the validity of my point.

I almost think this is a moot question, though interesting to think about.

The world, technology & online culture have changed so much over these years. I don't think submission/curation standards could have remained consistent throughout.

Google, FB and internet companies becoming $>trn companies happened in that time period. Crime, sports & politics have become intertwined with the stuff that was on topic back in the day. FB or Twitter's policies are a major factor in elections worldwide. That's inevitably political. Cybersecurity, infosecurity and even (silly as it sounds) meme-wars are playing a big role in the current eastern european affair.

TV news came to us, moreso than we went to it...I think.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

A key problem is that these days a lot of techie/nerdy/geeky/hackery news has a potential political angle. Advances in cryptography, drones, medical matters, and many other things, increasingly touch on politics because they touch the wider world not just techie people and often do so in decisive ways.

Take face recognition and similar tech: all cool as the tech on its own, but there are scary implications that we see forming already so even if the original post is a purely technical & politics free look at a new development the comment threads resulting from it often won't be.

Conversely, political issues affect technical ones: free speech or the lack there of both has an impact on the use of current tech and drives ideas for future systems, so while seen as a political matter by some (a philosophical matter or both by others) there are valid interesting technical discussions that can be had relating to changes in those issues around the globe.

> In the old days

I think some of that is that in the old days the connection wasn't as “real” because the tech being discussed was not widely used, or was in fact still only theoretical. Now the tech is out there, and many are using it including many who have no specific technical bent because these things are becoming part of normal life. Once tech touches real life, it touches the sticky subjective messy aspects of real life: politics & morality. Also even when things are still theoretical, the developments are more open to the general public for better or worse because access to information (and, of course, misinformation) continues to become increasingly ubiquitous.

Take cryptocurrency as an example. A decade or so ago it was just a techie plaything really. People were talking about what wider impacts it could have, but it wasn't having them yet and it wasn't clear that it actually would in the end. It is easy to be dispassionate and unpolitical at that point. Now though some of those impacts have happened and continue to happen, and can affect lives in significant ways, so new stories on the subject can't help but attract some political discussion as well as going over the technical developments, or in fact are news stories about developments that are happening because of (to aid or circumvent) political concerns.

For another collection of subject matter that has seen a massive change in public and political interest, you only have to look at the last couple of years development in certain fields of biology.

There is little moderation here or elsewhere can do about this significant set of changes & movements. The mods and the community can nudge things in a certain direction, but they can't fully control them.

I think there are too many:

-posts about nostalgia, how the 'old' world wide web was better, retro computing, reliving the past, etc.

-quanta magazine math articles, because the concepts are too difficult or abstract for anyone to debate or discuss them

-posts about privacy, big tech bashing (gets tired, repetitive after while)

I would like to see fewer of those kind of posts. I would like to see more:

-personal blog posts

-posts about economics findings (instead of just the 'hard' sciences)

I've noticed they (TV news stuff) get upvoted pretty quickly, but also they get eliminated pretty quickly when flagged.

Software (some made by HN contributors) ate the world.

Seriously, it's all on-topic. That's why I went into software. It appealed to my cross-disciplinary interests.

Modern information technology provides the enabling basis of the current turnkey infrastructure for a total information awareness-enabled authoritarian regime in the US.

As in, it exists now. All of it. Already in the three letter agencies and social networks, you know or can extrapolate what everyone's opinion and views and compliance and "danger" to the regime.

Right now.

All it takes is a strongman from the D or R side to turn the key. So the political stakes are being reflected in the current capabilities of authoritarian large scale information technology for tracking.

Your web3 crypto blockchain will not help, they will own all the entry/exit points, and use of crypto will mark you as noncompliant and destined for the gulag.

I remember back when Carnivore was dismissed as conspiracy talk and I mostly agreed. And then came Snowden, and I remember the revelation of "wow I wasn't nearly paranoid enough".

Right now I will be gulag'd if the wrong party turns the key. Even if I don't make another political comment anywhere on the internet, I have decades of easily breadcrumbed data hoovered up that will lead straight to labor camps.

The fragile state of our government means that the existing authoritarian abilities of the NSA/CIA/etc are a far bigger existential threat to me than nuclear weapons, COVID, war, and maybe even on par with heart disease, cancer, and car crashes.

> All it takes is a strongman from the D or R side to turn the key.

An alternate theory: they have cooperatively turned that key together, although I wouldn't expect everyone is in on it, or that "the key" is something in particular, other than a "general methodology" of how politics is performed, in the theatrical sense of the word.

I spent a few hours a while back writing up a reusable answer for this question, with lots of links from years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

The short answer is that not much has changed, including the perceptions of change (e.g. "HN is becoming 2005 Slashdot" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 - August 2013.)

If anyone wants to understand our thinking about political topics on HN, here are some links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490

or you can look at these past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

p.s. In case anyone's worried, no, we're not letting (or going to let) HN be taken over by politics. The proportions are stable and carefully regulated, although there is fluctuation, as with any stochastic process.

how do you manage all these replies? is it just bookmarked or do you keep a spreadsheet? I see you do this often.

I guess they're engraved into my brain like a wax recording by now.

I have keyboard shortcuts to bring up the most common ones, but otherwise I just go find them in HN Search.

For those not familiar with it, HN's search, provided by Algolia, has syntax for searching posts, comments, by author, within date ranges, and (for posts) above or below thresholds, and more.

See: https://hn.algolia.com/help

It's also accessible as a DDG bang, !hn

I also make heavy use of search. Often searching for dang's comments ;-)

>I have keyboard shortcuts to bring up the most common ones

More evidence that dang is a superhuman form of life.

> I guess they're engraved into my brain like a wax recording by now.

Because you had frequent access to these resources/links/texts as a part of your job, I believe they live in your brain's RAM.

Keep up the good work @dang!

I can call up specific tweets from years ago by searching keywords that I remember (or at least I used to be able to before Twitter nerfed search). Just sticks in the brain.

Hacker News's biggest problem is the chilling effect. The long-timers know that if you write too well and people start inquiring about a "follow" feature with you in mind, it's only a matter of time before you get banned because you're "too young" (well, he isn't anymore) to have that kind of "success" and less articulate people feel bad about themselves.

On politics, Hacker News itself isn't right-wing, at least most of its users aren't, but the fact that anything more than a standard deviation to the left gets you hammered through that passive aggressive rank-altering and "slowban" has really put a damper on the ability for people to indulge their intellectual curiosities. Simply asking whether we, who "hack" in service to corporate capitalism, are doing the right thing, is enough to get you in trouble.

There are some absolute top-notch people posting here, but there are far too many corporate shills, and the good ones know they have to be careful.

"...there are far too many corporate shills, the good ones know they have to be careful."

Huh. Today I learned I'm not one of the good ones.

You only have 258 karma. You don't have to worry yet. When you get into the mid-thousands, that's when things get dicey.

Tech is like card counting. If you actually figure the game out, you get punished and flushed out. If you keep gambling and losing and don't know why (because you're bad at what you're trying to do) there will be a seat at the table until everything is squeezed out of you.

Maybe. I don't invest enough time and emotion here to have anything substantial to lose.

I consider myself a tradesman who, naively or not time will tell, leverages a rarified skill set at market rate trying to deliever value to clients as best as I can.

Millenial enough to have no expectations of a charmed future, despite earning an annual income in the top decile, but not jaded enough to put a price tag on my soul, principles nor well-being.

Though I am reasonably active on HN, I actually have no idea what you mean. Could you go into more detail about 'the game' and what one should worry about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

...and I just lost.

I have ~12k karma and never experienced anything getting dicey. I’ve never been affiliated with YC or the mods.

In my experience it’s a pretty fair community and I’ve been downvoted many times.

Ditto what 'awb said, every word.

> Tech is like card counting. If you actually figure the game out, you get punished and flushed out.

Wouldn't this dynamic that you describe from your perspective exist in every industry?

Assuming there’s a “game” to be played, and you get pushed out, you probably didn’t understand the real game.

In the card counting example, the game isn’t blackjack, the game is the house always wins. If you’re card counting and losing money, no one cares.

I’ve been reasonably successful in tech and don’t know of any games besides the free market.

At least no games with underlying dynamics you would like to share, and I say that with a grin.

The discussion of moderation policies and topics in posting usually derive from a shared understanding of a forum as a group of people, rather than a trajectory where current community opinions in turn, create the future community.

There is also the origins of Hacker News as Startup News, which immediately creates a covariance constraint between seniority and topic. The only way this dynamism can be managed is having temporal aspects (e.g., boundaries, limits on accelerationism toward specific topics), included in moderating policies.

> You only have 258 karma.

And you only have 1 karma, so you're not qualified to say what you said in your previous post. Of course, my point is that I know how much karma you have, as much as you know how much karma any other person has, which is...you don't. And I've been here long enough to know that your original comment is getting downvoted, because it's largely full of false statements. Sure, you can cherry pick a few examples here and there, as you could on any site, but to say that is is HN's "biggest problem" is demonstrably false.

> I know how much karma you have, as much as you know how much karma any other person has, which is...you don't

FYI, clicking a username tells you have much karma someone else has.

For example, you have 4,258 karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stronglikedan

I think the implication is that you don't know how many accounts into HN someone is.

For example, I could make a burner and appear to have 0 karma, but still have however much I've got on this account - much like sveno appears to have done.

I have 51000 karma. I am not playing any game. I just enjoy posting here, and try to make interesting comments. I far prefer it to Reddit and Slashdot, and rarely bother with them anymore.

Probably all thanks to dang!

I also have many unpopular views, and know I'm going to get downvoted plenty for them, but post them anyway.

My tactic is more trying to get people to either think through or substantiate their claims or positions than simply focusing on "unpopular opinions". Including in some recent exchanges with you. I make a point of challenging what I suspect are viewpoints adopted for conventionality rather than empiricism or reasoning.

That also occasionally seems to unsettle some readers. I think on balance it improves the site. All the more so when people respond or learn things.

(I've certainly learned from being challenged on my own comments, and make my own fair share of errors.)

I made one submission that got a LOT of traction. which got me to around 1k karma.

Karma is useless.

> Karma is useless

Exactly. I can't even trade it for a cuppa coffee.

Similar karma, also post as I think. Often disagree with viewpoints expressed, including many of those of WalterBright's.

But I agree with him here that there's been no general penalty observed.

The only things I've noticed are a couple of people reaching out on account of my being on the leaderboard (no, I can't get your posts approved, yes, I will report your trying to do so), and having corresponded with the mod team for years (occasionally viewpoint issues, mostly boring submission stuff such as titles, disambiguated URLs, and occasional spam), what I think is a fairly good mutual understanding. Not always agreement, but general respect. I'll make my case or argument, and almost always accept the moderation response. I've had numerous submissions entered into the 2nd chance pool.

Overall calibre of discussion for an open and general-interest website is excellent. Occasional visiting expertise is an added plus.

My own submissions sometimes succeed, are occasionally flagged, and mostly just languish in the "new" page.

It's a tech-themed reddit, bro. It's not that deep.

I'm finding this a little hard to follow but I'd love to see an example of anyone we banned for writing well or being "too young".

Y'all never banned me and I was definitely an articulate, immature asshole with a victim complex.

I'm REALLY glad I don't remember my username from my high school years.

We come here not for the news, but for the comments. This kind of high quality community can't be found anywhere else, and that also applies to world/politics themes. Yes, you can read about that stuff elsewhere, but you won't find balanced views and rational arguments without ad hominem attacks. There are traces of that on HN too, but in vast majority of cases it's very civilized, opposed views are discussed and not downvoted to death. At least not as much as on other platforms.

> It’s awesome to go to a thread and see helpful links or comments that enhance the conversation.

Without fail :) Thanks @dang!

I've noticed that all the online spaces I enjoy visiting are heavily moderated. Whenever I get linked to "free speech" loosely-moderated platforms, I usually hit the back button pretty quick.

I can't wait for https://www.deso.org/ to take off, not just for the value of the coin to increase, but to see lots of nodes taking over the responsibility of twitter/fb/youtube etc's what's okay and what's not. There will be someone willing to run a node that has all the stuff blocked or unblocked to suit everyone's tastes.

Isn't that how the different Matrix servers work already?

Incentives! You have to listen to Nader Al-Naji explain the vision. It gives me goosebumps.

>Incentives! You have to listen to Nader Al-Naji explain the vision. It gives me goosebumps.

This isn't a knock on you personally, but when I come to HN for discussion, I'd like the discussion to be on HN.

Insisting that I view some YouTube (which I avoid like the plague because I hate their business model) content in order to understand your point of view, just makes me want to ignore you. Not down-vote you, just ignore you.

It sounds like you have a point of view that seems (to you at least) important. If it's that important/relevant/insightful, then please explain your point of view.

I don't know or care who "Nader Al-Naji" might be, nor am I going to jump off to another site to find out.

I want to be crystal clear about this: I'm not trying to beat up on you (andrewfromx) or anyone else. Rather, I'm interested in your point of view not that of some rando on the site of some rapacious corporation.

Anybody can run their own platform right now without involving any cryptononsense. That's how the net used to work after all. Anybody failing to understand what lead to the centralization is bound to reproduce the same mistakes. It's not a technical issue, it's a social one.

I'm a believer after watching "The Next Big Social Media Network Will Be On the Blockchain. Nader Al-Naji Tells Us Why." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFiPVGN3J2M

Yes, in general "free speech" platforms seem to quickly turn into Alt-Right platforms that are, ironically, heavily moderated. (Looking at you, Voat)

I've said this before, but it's particularly notable how free speech Reddit alternatives very quickly end up taking a far-right tone.

What's really funny is how all discussions they host have to be approached from that angle.

So you can't just talk about your favorite TV show. You have to first make a nod to how it features a Jewish conspiracy to push black-white interracial relationships. Only then can you go on to discuss the actual episode.

This is because Reddit was the original free speech platform, and you could find anything from any or no political leaning. Then they dropped free speech and kicked off right leaning content. So of course the alternatives quickly go right. If they had kicked off left wing content all of the free speech sites would be left, and you couldn't talk about your favorite TV show without going into the relative representation of different races in the cast.

Pretty sure right-leaning content per se is still available on reddit and what's actually banned is outright Nazism, racism, violence, etc. Lefty content featuring coordinated politcal violence would also get banned, if it existed.

> Lefty content featuring coordinated politcal violence would also get banned, if it existed.

And that last part is the entire point: There simply is no mainstream-relevant occurency of left-wing terrorism and murders any more in the Western world. The most relevant militant group was the German RAF, which has all but dissolved in the early 90s (there are three still on the run and occasionally robbing a bank but that's it). In contrast, murders and other organized violence and terrorism based on right-wing ideology is shockingly commonplace.

With online-based hate speech, it is just the same matter, only a different medium - and there is so much more content that draws in right-wing hate speech (such as anti-immigration stuff, antisemitism, Islamophobia and LGBT hate) than anything that inspires left-wing hate speech. The only thing that comes close to hate speech from the left wing are the "eat the rich" slogan and Stalin/Gulag memes, and that's it.

As a result, it is obvious from the numbers that the right wing will always complain about "we are getting censored and the lefties are not!!!"... well, duh, how about if the complainers would stop doing the things they get moderated for?!

If you don't count the CHAZ, or the BLM riots, or the guy who shot the Republican congressman at the baseball game, or the guy who shot 12 cops in Dallas...

Many lefty subs were banned or permanently quarantined for support of the USSR, and one was even banned for saying slaves killing their owners was justified in the context of pre-abolition America. I don't think it's about "coordinated political violence", it's about clearing out the site so that it's a safer place for advertisers and investors.

Usenet, mailing lists, numerous BBSes, and any number of earlier Web forums look on your assertion with bemusement.

Reddit claimed free speech as a value in its early years. That sentiment has evolved, for all the usual reasons.[1]

It is possible to host a wide range of significant views without becoming overtly hostile to the majority of the population, and the viewpoints held by those.

Reddit was in no way "the original free speech platform".

________________________________

Notes:

1. TL;DR: it's untenable and spirals into a cesspit, QED.

I should say the last universal free speech platform. It's a cesspit anyway. Not sure how you can blame that one on freedom of speech.

I'd disagree with the first sentence as well.

My main complaint with Reddit is that the direction it's been taking the site over the past five years or so, and more pointedly the improvements it's not made, are far divorced from where I'd like to see it go.

Reddit wastes my time and does not reward time spent on site with valuable insights. Not strictly for cultivating misinformation and disinformation, though that's a fair-sized piece of my concern. I'm more concerned that it simply kills good conversation or prevents it from arising in the first place.

Because the only people who feel the personal need for a "free speech" platform are the ones whose views are considered odious elsewhere.

If people with non-"odious" views end up at such a platform, they will quickly notice the unusual concentration of "odious" views, and generally find it uncomfortable and leave. Thus there is a steady increase in the prevalence of "odious" views until they are near-universal on the platform.

And the people who run the "non free speech" platforms (i.e., all the popular ones) are operationally "opposed" to free speech primarily in the sense that they want a pleasant platform for advertisers, and hence must stifle the stuff that's unpleasant to advertisers. There is some personal ideology at the top of these organizations, but it is extruded through a profit seeking filter and often barely survives operationally intact.

I don't say this to excuse their actions or say that this filter is good, but that seems to be the fundamental mechanism.

Not strictly true.

Those whose focus is overtly offensive and oppressive speech, however ...

Isn’t this just more evidence that leftism/liberalism require censorship to exist, as they cannot survive in a free market of ideas?

No, it's evidence that people who claim to believe in a free market of ideas rarely do in practice.

In the free speech days of Reddit there was all sorts of lefty content that did just fine in the presence of all the right wing stuff, so it's definately not not true. But the strange part is that a lot of people on the left implicitly think that it is true. They will never admit that to themselves, though.

Liberalism is the free market of ideas. It is pretty distant from leftism and should not be conflated.

They said those platforms are just as censored, except in favor of the other side.

You're not comparing a heavily moderated site to an a lightly moderated one. You're looking at a site that's just as over-moderated as Reddit, just in favor of the opposite side of the political spectrum. A better comparison would be something like /g/

Voat was subject to a campaign planned by multiple neo-nazi communities, particularly 8chan's /pol/, to make the site unusable for non-nazis. It involved mass claiming any boards that could possibly be popular and giving them an explicitly white nationalist spin.

I can't really blame them for not stepping up to the plate and saying 'fuck off', since the genesis of the site had to do with Reddit overmoderation, and even appearing to step into the same shoes could have had killed the site.

Do you seek the truth unconditionally, or only truth that fits within your pre-conceived notions of acceptability? Can you imagine a society where an objective truth was unacceptable, and denial of that truth was harmful to themselves or others?

To be frank, often when I see this glossy pamphlet cover for free speech, you open up the pamphlet and see a bunch of child porn, antisemitism and/or racism.

The issue with free speech platforms is they attract a crowd of people whose only narrative is one that can't be said in other places. It isn't a narrative of truth, it is one of hate and bigotry.

I've seen few examples where objective truth is banned. I have, however, seen a lot of Nazis get banned.

That’s just a flaw in your brain’s logical processing.

I’ve seen this again and again, people will see an ocean of normal content anywhere free speech is allowed and laser-focus on the single floating turd.

They’ll then mischaracterize the entire ocean as the turd, it’s like they have no sense of proportionality.

Name a free speech platform where I'm not going to find the turd on the front page at this very moment.

I'm happy to be shown to be wrong, but from my experience what you are saying doesn't exist.

I think of the sea of knowledge as a bunch of floating turds at first sight, which are intentionally provocative and noxious but easy to spot, mostly water below, which is the context of common knowledge and beliefs, which may be the unstated assumption of the material, and then nuggets of gold below, which are hard to find because they are repressed for some reason, legal, social, safety, or otherwise, and therefore potentially valuable to a certain set of objectives. But both turds and gold nuggets face the same types of moderation pressure by their disruptive nature.

> But both turds and gold nuggets face the same types of moderation pressure by their disruptive nature.

Again, I fundamentally disagree. You are being vague and overly general on the sort of moderation pressure. The actual banned content on most social media platforms, if we bring it out of context, ends up things like CP and Nazis. If those are the "disruptive ideas" we need to explore truth, then I'm pretty ok never finding it.

On almost every social media site (except, ironically, "free speech" platforms) there is a space to discuss everything from communism to anarchy. Crystal healing to quantum physics. Ghosts to exoplanets. Nihilism to Scientology.

The actual set of banned discussion is pretty much all centered around speech that directly leads to harm.

The reason I keep bringing it back to "what is actually banned" is because when you get right down the actual banned conversations, they are both few and not really worth discussing for "truth".

Name a banned "golden nugget" conversation. You say there is censorship, so list it. Tell me what sort of deep conversation or truth we can't know because we stop Nazis from using the N word.

“Tell me something that will get you banned” Ummm… no.

I can tell you ‘about’ something that would. For instance, I would get banned for doxing you. The reason why I would get banned is that the information would be very valuable to someone that the forum is not interested in helping. Some banned conversation includes realities that explain what is going on in the world in a way that can greatly benefit a potential investor, or equivalently, greatly misguide them. Given that there is no way to discern between the two, both are banned.

I have one personal example that I am willing to share. I learned a tremendous amount of helpful information about birth practices and infant care from one of these ‘extreme free speech’ platforms. An example is cord clamping. The debate of this topic was extremely irreverent and ad-hominem, but it was easy to see that logic and objective results clearly favored one side, regardless of the civility with which this information was presented. Sadly, I don’t believe the information would have been effectively communicated in its most polite form, because it was clearly out there for all to see for a very long time without any improvement to common practice. The problem is that a reasonable person must ask why experts would ignore such information before accepting alternative possibilities, and this necessarily leads to a very dark rabbit-hole showing politically-incorrect evidence of extreme dysfunction within their profession. This became broadly applicable to me personally. My OB/GYN was objectively harmful to my baby, my pediatrician and nurses were wonderful, and this was all much less confusing given that understanding.

> I would get banned for doxing you

Ok, and how would doxing me be something that would further finding truth? That's not an example of a productive conversation limited because of anti-free speech.

> An example is cord clamping.

Nothing in your example is a conversation that couldn't be had on "anti-free speech" platforms.

What you've failed to give me is an example or description of communication that cannot be had on non-free speech platforms that isn't itself a turd.

Unless your doxxing example was to say "Hey, this researcher that lives on 123 maple street is where clamping came from and we clearly can't trust people from maple street because that's were bad people are from".

That, in and of itself, doesn't seem like a good way to go about discovering truth.

I think the proportions are more like an olympic swimming pool of "normal" content and a single turd.

And you know what? I don't know many people who want to swim in even a 100m pool with a turd floating in it.

> people will see an ocean of normal content anywhere free speech is allowed

Not sure I agree on this one. Forums like /r/conservative, patriots.win, and Gab claim to be in favor of "free speech," but dissenters quickly get banned. 4chan comes to mind — people do indeed post things of all political slants there, and the only moderation seems to be removing obviously unlawful content. And yet 4chan is almost decidedly covered in turds.

Why bother making an argument that pretends people can't see the difference between 4chan /pol/ and MetaFilter? You don't even have to like MetaFilter to see that they're not the same species of site, and that the differences have nothing to do with a search for the truth.

I’m unaware of the similarities actually.

> Do you seek the truth unconditionally

To truly be open to everything you have to make a lot of analysis and filtering effort. If you go to a lot of the sort of information sources the GP mentioned, the signal-to-noise ratio is so low that unless you have literally nothing to do with your day the chance of finding some useful truth is neg liable (sometimes even zero, because sometimes the signal is not just downed out by noise it is actively beaten away by it).

I seek truth as unconditionally as it is practical for me to do so.

On a society level there should certainly be room for every type of voice. Governments shouldn't moderate forums. But there's definitely value in small communal focused bubbles like this as well, that isn't manipulated into derailment by some mob hive mind. (Speaking as someone very pro free speech.)

Of course. Because like you, I am literally Plato himself.

Here here. This and metafilter are my two islands of quality, both very much moderated.

I think what's been even more effective than moderation for Metafilter is the imposition of a $5 flat fee to join. I would happily pay as much to stay on HN. A very affordable and worthwhile purchase for an individual, but a significant economic barrier for bot farms.

Slate Star Codex put it nicely "The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."

Which is funny since it's an accurate description of his comment section, although I'm sure he knows that.

Can't say this has been my experience. Many of the places I've found with the best discussions have had little to no moderation. The old IMDB boards, for example, were almost entirely devoid of moderation, but had some of the best and most informative discussions about movies and TV shows. There are a number of niche forums I frequent that are similar.

I've even seen a number of subreddits with no moderators/inactive moderators which were pretty good, even with a few thousand members.

I suppose might be that the forums you're discussing may be one of the ones created with the express selling point of having low/no moderation, while these other places where created as a place to have discussions first and foremost.

There are some hidden gems, that's right.

But I had the impression that you habe to ignore a swath of racism, sexism, homo/transphobia, and conspiracy theory to find them.

Personally, I've found that I've had to avoid hate and misinformation just about anywhere I go on the internet. I think there's a tendency for people to get used to the hate and misinformation that's acceptable for their in-group and become blind to it, thinking that their corner of the internet is devoid of it.

For instance, many posts here about geopolitics appear to me as xenophobic and full of false information (particularly when they're countries that I'm familiar with). But it's hard for people to see that, or even think anyone could legitimately feel that way, when it's considered by the in-group to simply be "common sense." Heavy handed moderation about a subject (rather than simple topicality like with Hacker News) can lead to the entrenchment of these in-groups, which can both increases the level of these comments and leads people to think of them as nothing more than common discourse. It also increases bifurcation, so you have competing "destroy all Pepsi" and "destroy all Coke" forums, both of whom think they're merely bring moderate common sense ideas forward to oppose the extremists on the other end.

Having said that, the forums I'm talking about seem to have a lower level of this in general, since they often focus on a particular niche. Similar to how the rules against political discussion let's Hacker News have better discussions than in general, but when political discussions do slip through then tend to be closer to typical internet discussions.

True.

Usually the general sentiment on HN seems to be quite similar to that of the unmoderated communities. It's just that people here are more sophisticated in telling you why poor people had it coming.

> The old IMDB boards

Emphasis on "the old". Usenet in the early to mid 90s was pretty great too, but again, emphasis on "the old". Niches that haven't been discovered by many people yet will likely always function well.

Well, they were shut down in 2017. But they seemed to be about the same quality at the end as they were earlier on. The boards I frequent that haven't closed are still going strong with light moderation, however. Actually, I'd argue that the quality might even be better now than a couple decades ago.

It depends on what sort of content you're looking for. Reasoned discussion on contentious issues demands considerable moderation, but anonymous platforms are great for legitimate niche/curiosity-driven topics.

For example of the second, there was a thread on /ck/ a few weeks back where some guy (probably a grad student; I'll never know) stumbled on a few $K of food lab equipment. Thread went on with a variety of experiments/projects which ranged from "reasonable" to "why would you even consider this" (some kind of flavored oil distillate from a happy meal, used to make ice cream).

If that was on HN, it would be someone's social-climbing portfolio blog, or I would have to wonder if it's astroturfing by some lab equipment company, or Mcdonalds. I'd question if this really was a curiosity-based endeavor, or if it was just someone trying to signal to potential employers "look at my Relevant Project!" or "look how quirky I am!" to friends.

But none of that was a concern; there is really no way for that individual to profit or benefit from this in any context. It's an anonymous forum, and there's strong social pressure to not subvert that (unless it is simply by virtue of posting similar content). It takes the game theory out of the equation; nobody is trying to sell me something.

It's not for everything or everyone, and there's definitely some effort in filtering out garbage posts. The same goes for HN, except the content to manually filter out is the sea of sometimes-veiled advertisements and self-promotion rather than plain-faced flamebait.

Platforms can be both anonymous (or more usually, pseudonymous) AND moderated.

Schopenhauer's commentary on authorship and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivations should be far more widely read.

That thread on /ck/ was legendary! I've also seen some pretty funny "ITT: Pretend we're HN" threads on /g/. The Overlap between 4chan and HN seems to be larger than it originally appears...

I'd be suprised if most people on 4chan's /g/ and other anonymous technology boards wouldn't frequent hacker news on a regular basis. The individuals behaviour just depends on the sites social norms, so they're not a nuisance here.

Basically the Paradox of tolerance:

The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

I'd just like to say "thank you" to the moderators for helping make Hacker News such an interesting site. I've been reading Hacker News for years and it's really helped me keep on top of emerging trends in technology! Sometimes I've seen tech news hit Hacker News before even the major news outlets have a chance to report. It's pretty impressive. Keep up the good work!

I appreciate the repost. It's quite timely for me, because I had recently been reading and participating in a post about HN's apparent toxicity. This has helped me to gain some more perspective on the topic. Especially about how moderation is done. I'm really impressed by the moderators, I honestly had no idea how many people were moderating HN or how they did things. I admire the patience and care it sounds like they put into the community.

I missed it, thanks for the heads-up.

I love you, Hacker News, but you’re toxic

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349222 2022-02-15

HN is actually quite a lot less toxic than it was a few years ago. I'm not sure why, but I think the extremely cynical/100% rude communication style people just left for some reason.

Even Mr. management-by-perkele Linus has lightened up these days.

Don't know what they're all doing now, I would've said crypto but whenever I meet those people they're unreasonably positive.

Cherrypicking comments from a discussion forum with thousands of participants and no barriers to entry is a pretty weak way of criticizing the forum.

I mostly appreciate the mods (well, dang is the only one I've interacted with) but I'm pretty tired of being scolded for occasionally making one-sentence comments that lack substance, while in the meantime, the site tolerates people who write pages of absolutely untrue covid vax denialism but don't get any comments from the mods.

At this point I'm actively looking for a replacement community that focuses much more on ML and Linux, and not on the social issues associated with machine learning, or social justice warriors messing up tech firms, or people who seem to get their "science" from Fox News.

1. I've never seen a 'absolutely untrue covid vax denialism' that doesn't get downvoted to death here.

2. Just because others make bad comments, it doesn't mean you should, too.

3. Your type of bad comment is the one there's a rule against, while there's no explicit rule about being wrong.

Stop making insubstantial one-line comments, please.

OK, I will.

My "insubstantial" one-line comments are often more valuable to readers of HN than pagelong of pseudointellectual debate (I watch my upvotes carefully. Which reminds me: is there a tool to track votes and comments on my comments?)

Lame things get upvoted all the time so watching your upvotes is not really a measure of 'value'. Adding more lame things to the site just because it already has lame things only makes it lamer, not better.

I've spent the last several years treating Hacker News as a machine learning source and have learned to understand upvotes (and downvotes).

If you word things in a confrontationally, overly partisan, or ignorant way, you'll get downvoted, even by people who technically agree with you. So, go out of your way to write more neutrally to reduce downvotes on tone.

If you propose an unpopular idea, or criticize one of HN's Holy Cows, you'll get a bunch of downvotes from people who disagree with you. Occasionally, I don't comment at all if I think my opinion is out of the mainstream and not justifiable.

Some folks just downvote people who state the truth because they don't like negative naysayers. Make it clear, if you're stating How the World Is, that you don't necessarily agree with it, but it's a structural problem.

Other folks don't like simple solutionism so avoid saying "It's easy. We can solve world hunger by <blahblahblah> idea" which will never work, because food production isn't the reason people are starving.

Another thing that can get you downvotes is invoking Expert Privilege. For example, HN will downvote you if you don't provide some sort of pseudo-rational sounding argument and instead just say you're an expert. OK, fine, ignore the fact that my PhD taught me how to read science papers and press releases.

Finally, and this is the most interesting thing, votes come in waves. I'll often get -2 on a comment right after I post and then it will trend upward for a whole day. I suppose my comments age well.

Ultimately, maxxing my karma is generally correlated roughly with making good contributions to the site, and I've calibrated well enough to interpret downvotes.

Be that as it may, you should still not post lame one-liners. That's still just obviously lame and you get sensibly scolded for it because it makes the site worse, orthogonal to unified theories of voting you may have developed.

Disagree. It's not particularly lame. A well written one-liner conveys more information and wastes less time. Maybe HN could have a "vetted user", somebody who generally plays by the rules of the site, so that people can see one-liners and know the person making them has the authority to say it.

Perfect example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30246830&p=2#30247139

It's totally lame and the example is, indeed, perfectly lame. But there's a trivial way to make these good which, if you look at dang-scoldings of lame one liners, works surprisingly well for a huge number of them, not just yours:

Write the one liner and then imagine you got a moderator scolding. Then write a comment defending your one liner from the charge of 'unsubstantiveness'. Finally, delete the one liner and post the defense.

I bet you'd almost never get scolded for these and the upvotes would be even bigger.

https://www.hnreplies.com/

Dead simple. Somehow it’s also emailed me minutes before the reply became visible on HN. I later realized that the user probably had a “delay” set in their profile, but HN likely publishes the comment to the API even if it remains hidden on the site for a few minutes. So it was funny to see a secret way to bypass the delay feature.

Upvotes are a terrible proxy for value, by the way. One wouldn’t say that a Reddit comment was valuable just because it was popular. The same standard seems true on HN — particularly for fluff, which tend to be upvote magnets.

Collabortive-filtering tends to have a strong brevity bias.

That's only one problem with collective moderation. Moderators are a trust and quality backstop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376111

Is this irony?

One-line comments are great, when they're substantial. Omit needless words. But also, omit needless comments.

Try libera.chat. It's supposedly the successor to Freenode.

> I'm pretty tired of being scolded for occasionally making one-sentence comments that lack substance

I went through months of your comment history with showdead:true, I could only find a handful of interactions between you and the moderation staff.

The most recent example is about 10 days ago and then one 36 days ago. Both comments were gray from being downvoted and one has been flagged.

There was another one about 40 days ago that had a bit more content to it but was simply you quoting yourself where you call a concept idiotic... on a post that had a pinned comment by Dang that said "If you're going to comment, please focus on specific, interesting things in the article that you're curious about."

Dang exchanged with you politely to explain the issues every times.

What more do you want?

Personally, I know that I don't want to see content such as your "y'all look like a cult" comment. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29864386>

Don't forget, you're here forever.

All right, listen here jerk!

;

>>absolutely untrue covid vax denialism

Yeah, So a bit of background -- Both of my brothers are fully vax'd and what not. But take my elder brother:

- Personal physician (flight surgeon) to the joint chiefs at the pentagon

- Commander of the 10th medical wing in the USAF (80,000 servicemen and families)

- Director of the entire VA for the state of AK

- Now the CMO for a large hospital group

We have a LONG history in medicine. (i personally have built multiple hospitals (tech side) but my family has been in medicine for ~80 years at this point...

Yeah, I have a heart condition, and I will NEVER get a vax due to my fear of myocarditis... (inflamation of the tissue surrounding the heart) (exacerbated if you have any form of heart disease)

denialism as you call it, requires data, TRUSTED DATA - and medications require long-term review to determine their safety.

NONE of this applies to covid vax?

Nuremburg ring a bell at all? Consent is a word, no? Have you ever consented to rape? Shall you now be forced to accept something sans data, "because we tell you to"?

I absolutely detest the idea that people who are anti vax are somehow 'wrong'

It is a messy topic, but I am not vax denialist but here is a cool fact for you:

When my middle daughter was ~3 she got the chicken pox vaccine just before we flew to chicago to build out the Salesforce Office I was managing...

After arrival in Chicago, our intention was to go to the Zoo the next day...

Late in the envening my daughter was fussing...

She got the chicken pox FROM THE VACCINE

She spent over a week in the hotel room in a calamine bath and we had to extend our trip another week because she couldnt fly due to the pox.

I personally got the chicken pox TWICE (at 6 months and at 14 years) -- AND I WAS VACCINATED.

My elder brother also expresses I should not get the vaccine.

There should be little badges, like employees at nuclear power plants wear, except if you exceed a certain threshold of online discourse you are quarantined in a wifi free zone until you have decontaminated. Irl most people oti are not as weird or insane as you would guess from interacting with them, the exceptions are those driven insane by internet dscourse.

Tldr Hacker News is seriously the worst moderated forum with the worst posters, except for all the other ones.

Good ol Dang, hero to some, voice of reason to others [1]

[1] http://cosmonautdreams.com/images/dang.jpg

Also a bully and an autocrat.

I've gotten lit up by dang a few times - and I usually disagree with his criticism, though in retrospect he's probably correct - but I've always been impressed with his dedication to this site. It takes a lot for someone to be a moderator, especially with the amount of text coming through this site. I've often wondered if was actually an AI that gained sentience yet doesn't realize that he's an AI.

> Gackle, whose name is pronounced “Gack-lee” and who declined to share his age, is a muscular, bald, and loquacious father of two and a devoted fan of the Canadian sketch-comedy show “The Kids in the Hall.”

So... an AI that can do deepfakes as well? Amazing.

dang does a generally good job, though there have been times that HN has allowed some discussion that I find quite immoral and heinous, and I was chastised by dang for speaking out against it with strong words. However I get that I am very far left, and this is a website that is generally pro-capitalism, even despite its many failings - and that I am the outsider in this perspective.

2019. Original discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052

Yes, these threads are starting to get a little less "lonely" aren't they. I guess once a year ("or so" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) is ok.

Macroexpanded:

The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048415 - Nov 2020 (291 comments)

The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052 - Aug 2019 (777 comments)

> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative ...

Reading this, I felt the description hit very close to home with regards to a substantive amount of discourse here. I also learned a new word!

It's very meta, because "performative erudition" could be the subtitle of The New Yorker.

They should know it when they see it.

And just using the phrase "performative erudition" is itself an example of performative erudition!

Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048415

Regarding the throwaway accounts, I wish there was some way to delete old comments. I think I have the moral right to control their lifetime, and occasional gaps in 5 year old discussions will not really matter to anyone.

Without such an option the logical alternative is to periodically cycle your username, amassing somewhat of a sockpuppet army if you are so inclined.

This article made me appreciate dang and anyone that has anything to do with the site so much more. Big thanks to all.

The secret that nobody tells you about HN is that it's not moderated by dang and sctb, but by dang, sctb and all users. In a sort of emergent way by users, of course, because we just downvote the kinds of comments we don't want to see (and some probably actively look out for comments that break the site guidelines) and upvote the ones we want to see. Hence the constant chatter about the "hive mind" etc. I guess. If you have a large body of users up- and down-voting what they think is right/wrong behaviour there's going to be _some_ tendencies that come out on top in every thread, and perhaps in the site as a whole. But that's not to say that what these top-tendencies are won't fluctuate wildly, even in the same day.

It's complicated. A simulation would be interesting.

Good point about user involvement, but I'd wager that there are at least 3 more "secrets".

The first is that a lot of the moderation is done algorithmically. Things like "flamewar detector" cool down stories that look like they are getting too many comments.

The second is that user flagging plays a very large role. For better or worse, if some tiny percentage of users think a comment or story is inappropriate for the site, it disappears. User vouching then plays a smaller but also important role in reviving some of these.

The last is that 'sctb' is no longer involved, and 'dang' is the sole remaining moderator. Sometimes I think he encourages people to believe that 'sctb' is still involved because he'd be embarrassed if people knew how much time and effort he puts into the site.

This nearly brought me to tears. dang and Scott's story was really moving. The humanistic approach, the amount of work to make this website so good. Falling off a mountain and realizing you need a job & need to give up on your startup... novel-worthy stuff.

Question for the mods (@dang):

Do you not experience some kind of information overload from monitoring all those stories and comments on HN? How are you able to handle all of that?

Otherwise I just want to say thank you for maintaining this forum and making sure it stays interesting.

At first it's like being paid to eat cheesecake: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... You stop enjoying the cheesecake, and then you stop eating it.

Later, it's like having one's brain sandblasted: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I don't remember most details but I pattern-match quickly.

It's probably not so different from doing any other rather-specific thing enough times.

I also wrote a browser extension with a lot of keyboard shortcuts that by now has close to 10 years of learning baked into it. It doesn't make any decisions but it lets me do repetitive things faster. One of these years I want to open source it (or make it a profile option to serve as JS) so people who like keyboard shortcuts can flip around the threads more easily. It just requires surgery to take out the mod-only bits, which is a bit like separating conjoined twins.

You have created an expert system for HN comment threads implemented as a browser extension and with a knowledge base encoded as keyboard shortcuts.

Now all you need to do is to use machine learning to learn the shortcuts, and then use them. Then you will have automated half of your job :P

Long read but it worth every letter written, well done!

A few bullets..

1. Does the moderators use some form of automation to extract suspicious posts/comments or they go manually scanning all posts with the full threads? I'm just finding it to be extremely difficult to monitor 24/7 manually.

2. It's really an interesting story this "SkySheet" and just heard about it.

3. I believe this article would be of another level if it was recorded as a podcast where we can hear their natural voices in a live discussion.

4. Am I the only one who find it extremely difficult to understand why [some] HNewsers don't and, won't follow the site guidelines, go blind and write whatever will fill this gap in their ego?!

In this site I've learned to be careful of what I write on the internet. I keep returning because almost everyone follows the same rule: write if you have something interesting to say politely, otherwise read and move on. It's quite the opposite of other famous communities (except for some subs on reddit) where everyone is fighting for karma points with memes and copycat comments or evidently pushing their agendas. Thanks to you dang and to everyone involved for moderating such an interesting place.

I missed this the first time around, thanks for posting!

Mods, probably don't say it enough, but most of us deeply appreciate you!

Just to say it explicitly, dang, you're doing a great job.

One thing that puzzles me is why HN does not have a policy of banning users who post explicitly racist comments. I sometimes (unwisely) get sucked into arguing with these people. However, this is essentially impossible to do within the site guidelines, as you either have to have a respectful discussion with a racist (which only legitimizes them) or call them out for being a racist (which isn't allowed). I'm aware that racist comments often get flagged, but then again, they also often don't. And users who post such comments are able to continue contributing to the site.

I won't post links to examples here because, again, that is probably not within the site guidelines. But I'm happy to supply on request.

We do ban such accounts, and I've personally banned god knows how many of them. You're always welcome to email links to hn@ycombinator.com if you want us to take a look. Keep in mind that we don't see everything that gets posted here—not even close. For outrageously bigoted comments, the odds are high that we just haven't seen it yet. Any sufficiently large open forum is going to get those, and given that we don't know how to write software to detect them, there's an inevitable time lag before they get dealt with.

Outside that extreme sort of comment, though, the problem is not as simple as it sounds, or feels, because there's no consensus on how to define or interpret these terms. That means any particular moderation call is going to end up feeling wrong to a sizeable subset of users—good-faith users, not bigots or trolls. Put a few of those data points together and pretty much every reader is going to find a pattern to dislike. It's literally impossible to avoid this, even if we could see everything.

One consequence is that we/I regularly get lambasted with every horrible label that exists in polite society (a clarifying example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22941387), because most people misinterpret a sequence of bad-data-point experiences to mean "the mods must agree with and support this kind of thing".

I wish I could get across to people how these perceptions are unavoidable given the stochastics of the site (HN is a statistical cloud) and how our brains deal with randomness (by strongly overinterpreting it). I've been writing about this for years - a lot of which shows up in these links: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - but it doesn't really land. Even if one knows these things intellectually, it doesn't change how they feel, and the feeling determines everything.

It's true that you'd still be criticised by some people even if you did a perfect job. (And I do think that you do a great job!) Still, a specific criticism can be on target even if criticism in general is inevitable.

Joe Biden could point out, correctly, that he'll receive criticism both from the left and the right whatever choices he makes. But so what? It doesn't follow from this that he's actually making the right decisions, or that he's found some kind of perfect middle way, or that he doesn't have any discernible political leanings. Nor does it follow that anyone who thinks that Joe Biden is left (or right) of center has been deceived by some kind of statistical artefact or cognitive illusion – though no doubt some of them may have been.

So I'm not sure that I buy the claim that HN is striking the roughly the right balance because roughly as many people call you a Commie as call you a Nazi. I mean, who cares what people hurling thoughtless insults think? Since when were they the instrument by which we calibrate the range of acceptable discourse?

One possibly constructive suggestion. It might help if there was some kind of explicit indication that an account had been banned. It would be reassuring to see this when stumbling across some horrible post from a negative karma account. I bet a lot of these accounts have been banned, but there's no visible indication of that.

I agree, and am not making a Goldilocks argument (i.e. we must be just right because we're in the middle) - that's not only a non sequitur, it's a cognitive bias (you can make anything seem reasonable by framing it that way).

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

We do mark some accounts as banned in extreme cases, but it's a manual switch. We added it a year or two ago because some people would forget that they had turned on 'showdead' in their profile and then get upset about all the dreck they were seeing on HN. If anyone notices a particularly egregious account they're welcome to bring it to our attention at hn@ycombinator.com and we can turn that switch on.

When you say (in one of the linked comments)

> but it's not plausible to think that the answer is "one side is good and has good views and sees HN accurately, while the other side is bad and has bad views and sees HN completely the wrong way".

it’s not clear to me why you don’t think this is plausible unless you take the centerist position that all political extremes are equally wrong. It’s not like that would be a crazy point of view for you to hold. However, you seem to either deny holding it or deny that you are appealing to it as part of your argument.

You're quoting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25652412, in case anyone wants the link. In retrospect, my statement had a distracting red herring in it. I can make the argument clearer if I first simplify it to this:

> it's not plausible to think that the answer is "one side sees HN accurately, while the other side sees HN completely the wrong way"

The reason it isn't plausible is that the claims the various sides make (specifically about the ideological bias they perceive in HN, and in the mods) are so interchangeable—they resemble each other perfectly, except for one bit (the ideological polarity) flipped. It's possible that radically different mechanisms could be producing these isomorphic comments—wildly distorted perception in one case, accurate perception of reality in the other—but it's not plausible.

Suppose I come out of my house in the morning and the street is wet. Most likely it rained last night. Now what are the odds that most of the street is wet because it rained, but the stretch right in front of my house is wet because someone came out with a hose and watered it? That is possible, but not plausible. It's more likely that a common mechanism explains both, especially because there's a simple explanation for what that might be (that it rained).

I'm sure that's not the best analogy, but it's the first one that occurred to me (well, the second), and I can modify it to make it even more analogous to the situation on HN.

Consider that two neighbors are each convinced that while it rained on their neighbor's stretch of street, their own stretch is wet because someone came out in the night and watered it. It's possible that one neighbor is assessing reality accurately while the other is totally wrong. But it's not plausible. It's more likely that some common underlying mechanism is producing these perceptions, which are identical except for the obvious you/me bit flip, and which can't both be true because each claims the other is false.

> However, you seem to either deny holding it or deny that you are appealing to it as part of your argument.

It's the latter. The reason this is not an argument in favor of political centrism is that it's not an argument about the underlying politics in the first place. It's an empirical argument about the comments people post. These comments are so identical that it is not plausible that one mechanism produces half of them (or whatever the portion is) while a radically different mechanism is producing the other half. It is far more likely that a common mechanism is producing them—especially because there's a simple explanation for what that might be.

>One thing that puzzles me is why HN does not have a policy of banning users who post explicitly racist comments.

HN does have such policy.

The issue is some users think anything right of Trotsky is "racist", "White supremacy culture", etc. It's a term that has almost lost all practical meaning in $CURRENT_YEAR.

>But I'm happy to supply on request.

I'd love to see some examples, because practically every instance I've seen of racism in the comments section has been [flagged] quickly. I flag it everytime I come across it, and I rarely come across it these days.

Just a downvote and no reply. Shocked I tell you! Shocked!

"to make space for a more inclusive, wider-ranging vision of technology"

What on earth does this mean!?

Hacker news will probably go the way of Reddit, steady decline in quality, and everything infected with politics.

Please see the links at the bottom of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I spent a lot of time getting those just right :)

Note that the last one or two actually predate Hacker News, because it was called Startup News for the few first months.

Loved this.

A peek behind the curtain, and what I see is what I expect.

What a fantastic job you all (both? still?) do.

Truly anarchism in action. A wonderful thing. Nothing should last foever - long may you run!

This thread gave me the sudden urge to backdate HN on WebArchive.

What's amusing is the post on the front-page: "Web 2.0 is a bubble for 3 reasons" yet seeing the same for Web 3.0.

HN from 2007 http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/https://news.ycomb...

Edit: Strange downvotes...

If you’d like to have a deeper dive, HN has a way to see previous front pages: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2022-01-16

Oh cool, you learn something new every day. Although, WebArchive has a frozen-in-time feel to it.

> In an Emacs file, Gackle collects a list of contradictory statements that people have used to describe Hacker News.

dang, could you please describe your Emacs setup?

I use a vanilla Emacs that I download the binary of and that flickers annoyingly on the M1 Macbook I started using recently. My .emacs file is 861 lines long and, like anyone else's, contains years' worth of accumulated gizmos. Not sure what else to say!

I'm sure it seems unremarkable to you, but you are on the borderline of being a prominent enough user that your config is ipso facto noteworthy. (Less prominent than someone like Donald Knuth, but more prominent than someone like me.)

Anyway, thanks for all the moderating work!

Are you using Homebrew's `emacs-mac` (IIRC, the Homebrew packaging of "railwaycat Emacs", which you can also install directly)? It's holding up well on my M1.

Obviously, the other thing to say here is to share your emacs configuration, as is the tradition. But your call! :)

Dang.

In a remote-first/tech world, our lives are lonely, by design. We no longer have the social touch points we typically had. Water cooler talk, coffee walks, after-work drinks with the team, and work sports are no longer a thing.

Vibehut.io is a great solution to get your social fix. Vetted video calls based on your existing social platform and crypto holdings.

> Water cooler talk, coffee walks, after-work drinks with the team, and work sports are no longer a thing.

I would take HN over the water cooler talk, after work drinks and work sports.

Coffee walks ... probably worth keeping. Possibly an occasional workplace lunch too.

But then again, I've worked "alone" at home for more than 20 years, and so the social side of working life has felt fairly foreign to me forever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com