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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

HN is a strongly self-selected group of people, with rules against bad-faith arguments. But you can find groups like that in real life too.

The special thing about online is that when an obscure topic comes up, someone from the 0.0001% of people with deep knowledge of that subject can chime in. That dynamic basically never happens IRL, because you need a million eyeballs.

Like, outside of NASA, where would you encounter such a cluster of people with specific knowledge as in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31136285 ?

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> HN is a strongly self-selected group of people, with rules against bad-faith arguments

I'd love to see those rules enforced someday. There are plenty of examples of such arguments to be found here.

Please downvote or flag them.

I’ll try, but there’s no way if the core argument expresses a sentiment a large enough portion of the thread participants agree with.

I think there’s very little traditional trolling on HN (you likely won’t hardly ever see it without showdead on). The problem is when you open a thread that blatantly off topic (but it’s ok because nowadays we play really loose with submission guidelines, and use more general guidelines to invalidate more specific ones)

The problem is these make it onto the front page, and it’s just disingenuous flamewarring all the way down. You’ll never beat that.

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

I meant for real, Dan - like bring down the ban hammer more forcefully. Let's get serious about cleaning up this place.

Agressivenes in moderation (hah) can be counterproductive. Also, everyone has a bad day once in a while.

It's a bit of a balancing act. If you're too ban-happy you'll get an echo chamber (some would say that HN already is one) and if anything goes the trolls drive out serious participants. I think it's remarkable that the discussion here is as good as it is, compared to e.g. reddit or other forums.

There has to be a little room for jokes and sarcasm and "devil's advocacy," as that's part of how real people talk about things.

Exactly. The only people you should really be banning in an online community are repeat offenders who understand the rules and continue to disobey them in a way egregious enough to be harmful to the community.

That's a far smaller set than "people who post bad / stupid / annoying things."

It depends on your goal. If you want to make a community in which you minimize the number of people who post bad, stupid, or annoying things, you would run it differently than one where you welcome that sort of conversation.

You seem to be assuming that we don't enforce HN's rules. We do enforce the rules, but only on the posts we see. We don't see every post—there are too many.

You, or anyone, can help by flagging posts that break the site guidelines, and in egregious cases by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

Do you maintain metrics on the ratio of flagged posts or comments to those you take action on? Or categorize why such posts are flagged/removed?

I've only ever heard you say "trust us, we do this," but I can speak from experience that I have personally flagged some posts and comments that end up remaining anyway.

This is, of course, your site and you can moderate it as you please, but the quality of participation has been falling (IMO -- yes, I'm familiar with the guidelines saying not to complain about it) and it's been turning off participants who otherwise would have very wise, informed, and useful things to say.

For example, a distinguished engineer who did a lot of seminal work in performance benchmarking while at Sun and later wrote Linux's original source control system is gone now, dissuaded by the emotional and nonsensical conversations he was getting into here. IMO his opinions and insight are at the 99th percentile of in terms value here, and this site is far worse off for the absence of people like him.

Anyway, I don't want to get into a big debate here; just wanted to give my two cents.

>dissuaded by the emotional and nonsensical conversations he was getting into here

If they were conversations, then he must have been contributing to the emotion and nonsense, otherwise he could have just ignored it.

I don't know who your engineer is, but in some professional forums, I have seen prima donnas leave in a huff because they just couldn't stand to be challenged and couldn't refrain from going off-topic by discussing the personality of the other person(s).

> If they were conversations, then he must have been contributing to the emotion and nonsense, otherwise he could have just ignored it.

This is the precisely the kind of crap I'm talking about that brings HN down, where commenters just assert facts with no information whatsoever.

The only fact asserted here is that conversation involves more than one party.

Flagging doesn't just alert the moderators. It can also directly kill comments. Your one flag won't do it (of course), but the idea is that you're not the only one flagging. So it's worth doing (carefully!) even if you don't believe the mods are going to follow up.

I fear that a reply like this can come across as dismissive, but you have to understand that people have been saying that the quality of HN has been falling ever since HN started 15 years ago. There's a strong bias (if not several biases combining) to feel like it's always getting worse. Since people are saying this all the time, it's hard to give much weight to a bare statement along those lines. Positive generalizations aren't that different, btw. The main thing I've learned is that everybody overgeneralizes. Most likely we're hard-wired for it.

Because of that, specific examples actually carry more weight. The case you're describing sounds like someone it is really bad for HN to lose. But I'd need to see links.

Internet forums are super weird and there are limits to what one can do about it. I wish it weren't so. The way that large online group dynamics interact with individual psychology is bizarre, and often leaves people feeling wounded and aghast (I've tried writing about this a few times, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 or - using a somewhat melodramatic metaphor - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

It's easy to imagine that the admins should just "get serious about cleaning up this place", until you realize that different users have completely contradictory images of what that would involve, most of which aren't well-defined enough to be doable in the first place. And that's not even the hard problem! The hard problem is that what people experience is the product of a small number of external datapoints and a large number of internal ones.

p.s. I don't think we have a guideline against saying that HN's quality is dropping?

> people have been saying that the quality of HN has been falling ever since HN started 15 years ago

I agree with them. I’ve been sticking with it for these 15 years, but I’m sure you’re aware of a certain site that does a pretty good job characterizing how the comments on many of the most popular stories have devolved.

> Internet forums are super weird and there are limits to what one can do about it. I wish it weren't so.

Respectfully, this is a cop-out. This is your site. You can do anything you want to make it fit your vision, from making it members-only, to making every post subject to review. I’m not trying to tell you how to run your business or anything, but to throw your hands up in the air and say (paraphrasing), “Internet forums are hard, what can you do” strikes me as forfeiting responsibility.

> different users have completely contradictory images of what that would involve,

It doesn’t matter what users think. This isn’t a democracy. This site belongs to you and its owners. How it’s run, what the rules are, and who can be a member are choices you exclusively get to make. You are responsible for its tone and character. Don’t burden the members with this responsibility without giving them the direct ability to enforce it.

> You can do anything you want to make it fit your vision

That is definitely not true. Sure we could make arbitrary changes, many of which could easily kill the site. But the set of changes that can be made to make HN better fit its vision is far from obvious.

> I’m sure you’re aware of a certain site that does a pretty good job characterizing how the comments on many of the most popular stories have devolved

No, what site is that?

I don’t know that the changes would “kill the site” but I think it depends on how popular you want it to continue to be. Both public fora and exclusive clubs coexist in this world. I doubt one can have a truly open forum that has the decorum/behavioral norms and intellectual rigor of an exclusive club, though.

I'm somewhat surprised you're not familiar with n-gate!

> Respectfully, this is a cop-out. This is your site. You can do anything you want to make it fit your vision, from making it members-only, to making every post subject to review. I’m not trying to tell you how to run your business or anything, but to throw your hands up in the air and say (paraphrasing), “Internet forums are hard, what can you do” strikes me as forfeiting responsibility.

I would argue that the way HN is at the moment is the best fit for the vision of the people who own/run it.

The fact that everyone is "sticking" with it for over 15 years seems to suggest that whatever dang and the team are doing is "still" working.

Flagging goes both ways. There's a flagged post in this account's short history where I pushed back on a transphobic comment. Now various comments up from mine and down another branch are all flagged. Transphobic and anti-transphobic comments are all flagged to oblivion.

Probably the hope is that there are more nice people than not-nice people so on the whole the not-nice comments will disappear. From that one experience though it looks like it's at least as much about who's fastest to flag.

For sure flagging goes both ways on political/ideological flamewars. How could it be otherwise? That's not what HN is for.

The thing to do with egregious comments is not to feed them by replying, but to flag them (and in particularly bad cases, to email hn@ycombinator.com to make sure we see it).

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

I think dang is already doing an inhuman amount of work. He's easily the most active and most thoughtful moderator I've ever seen. He's a machine. Hard to imagine how things can be better than it's now unless we overhaul then entire moderation model and make it more distributed, like Slashdot (not saying that Slashdot specifically is better; it isn't) .

Dang needs to hire some of the old moderators of TeamLiquid's forum heh, that'd be interesting to see

I very rarely see a bad faith argument gain any traction and not get immediately shot down here. Not to say it doesn't happen, but IME it's more common that a bad faith argument gets called out and flagged than it is that the bad faith argument gets support and stands.

Other peoples' intent is fundamentally unknowable. Labeling someone's speech as "bad-faith" is repackaging an individual's subjective dislike of certain arguments into a justification for denying everyone else the ability to evaluate that argument and make their own individual judgement.

Which, if there is enough consensus, is generally pretty accurate and saves everyone a whole lot of brain processing. Only so many things can be evaluated and judged a day per person.

First of all, we have to make reasonable inferences of intent all the time. Being able to do so lies at the heart of criminal law (see mens rea). We'll never be able to probe into the subjective heart of someone, but we do our best based on available evidence and tolerate the errors, while always trying to converge closer to objective truth.

There are plenty of interesting things to talk about in this world. Not all comments are worth publishing or reading; some are deemed more valuable than others. Editorial discretion is one of the distinguishing characteristics of different discussion fora. Just like you could read a different newspaper if you disagreed with the editorial bent of one, a great thing about the Internet is that you can always start your own forum if you disagree with the editorial choices of an existing forum owner. And the startup costs are a whole lot lower, too.

The only bad faith argument I've ever seen on HN is calling any argument you disagree with and can't refute a "bad-faith argument".

Keep in mind, many times people making bad faith arguments don’t even realize it.

I think that demonstrates that the meaning of "bad-faith" is, well, in bad faith. A correct definition of "bad faith" makes it a question of the speaker's state of mind. Not only can the speaker always judge this for himself, but he is the only one who can judge it.

The only way a speaker could fail to realize his argument is in bad faith is if that is a question not of his own state of mind but of the listener's opinion.

You clearly haven’t been reading then.

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