Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

> 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.

> 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!

>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.

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