Comment by friendzis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by friendzis | Hacker News Reader

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> Do you want the unwashed masses in your specialist forums?

Having the choice between "unwashed masses" and "curated to suit political agenda" I would firmly choose the former.

Before I get attacked on political agenda angle, please understand that it takes trained professional actively trying to remain objective to have impartial moderation. Many professional discussion moderators fail here and you just cannot expect neither unpaid volunteers (doing things out of passion which is not impartial in the first place) nor paid employees enforcing company policy (again very much partial) to remain objective.

The goal of moderation should be to allow for multiple angles of thought to emerge and not get drowned. Give me the tools to see those non-mainstream positions.

> unwashed masses

The unwashed masses are often filthy and malicious (on the internet).

Moderation, of the governance and oversight meaning, is unforunately very necessary to keeping any pool from becoming a cesspit. By some combination of technical, volunteer, and participant effort (membership fee, or service requirement), areas can be kept decent.

Without this, decent and would-be participants are run off by spam, scams, trolls and harrassment, political rants, religious rants, etc.

Hence what happened to Usenet. I was active on comp.lang.c comp.lang.c.moderated comp.sys.3b1 comp.sys.3b2 back in the mid 1990s, by 1998, it had become a total hot mess. The moderated groups imploded, or shutdown, when the moderators just gave up. In particular, comp.lang.c.moderated was a fountain of knowledge on C language implementation specifics, then a few really pedantic asshats joined, and their MO was purely slandering and shouting. They had agendas, and they had no interest in sharing knowledge. I think a couple of them thought they could affect the evolution of the language, from outside ANSI, to suit their own personal opinions. Nasty little dictators. I completely dropped off usenet around 1998. In retrospect, I hung on for to long, hoping for a return to rational behavior.

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