Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)
twitter.com
twitter.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
Respect and many thanks, dang.
I would regularly get called a “nazi,” because I would step into catfights, and break them up, or “nip them in the bud.” Once you’ve been doing it a while, you learn to smell trouble brewing, and it can escalate rapidly.
Many folks chafe at restrictions, and they may actually be correct. They, themselves, may be entirely trustworthy; but others may not.
Generally, we’re all for rules and structure, as long as they apply to others (especially those with whom we disagree), but they shouldn’t apply to us.
I participate in HN, quite a bit. I basically avoid all other social media.
A big reason is the decorum, here. If it dissolves, then I will no longer participate.
I’ve been “danged” a few times. In some cases, I felt that it was not what I considered “reasonable,” but I accept the slaps anyway.
When in an Italian city, wear a bedsheet, and all that…
We're at least a couple decades beyond the point where a reasonable person could possibly entertain such a thought. Lack of restrictions always turns communities into cesspools. They don't necessarily die, but the people that hang out there are the ones that enjoy spending time in cesspools, and that's usually different from the vision the creator of the site had in mind.
When we can't assume one or the other we have to look at something else where we might reach a conclusion. If someone says they are oppressed we can look at what would hinder their oppression. Arguably this would be things like transparency, participation and equality. As those things make oppression harder.
So if someone says they are being silenced a reasonable person might look if there are multiple known moderators who can check each other, a moderation log to see how moderation is happening or some voting system to reflect the opinions of the community.
In most cases where people are says they are being silenced these things doesn't exist. As such it would be unreasonable to dismiss their opinion as there seems to be an argument for the restrictions not being legitimate. Otherwise you just create a different cesspool of unreasonable people.
Presumably you disagree, but then you disagree with the far majority of well regarded implementations in the real world. I am about to buy an apartment and it is the same thing. You need a witness, a contract and approval from the housing organization. Because that how you reasonably decide what happened.
And yes, people break the news all the time. For example on Twitter on this very post. That is the point. When they do how do you know who is reasonable? Which is what I have argued.
I recall having a +80 upvote or so reply “detached” in this way, but can’t find the link.
I looked for posts that match your description and found these three:
It looks like we detached https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058506 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058435 because it was offtopic - and probably also several other of the reasons I listed at the above link.
Looks like we detached https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28695222 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28694236 for similar reasons.
Looks like we detached https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30749836 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30748070 for similar reasons.
In all 3 cases, the original parent was a massive subthread, probably at the top of the page. When child threads develop under top-heavy subthreads and cause discussion to drift in a generic direction, away from the original topic, that's a problem for thread quality. This is one of the most common times when we detach subthreads. All 3 examples look like classic cases to me.
Moderating top subthreads in this and other ways is probably the single biggest thing that moderators do here to promote thread quality. It makes a huge difference. We've learned a lot about this in the last few years.
By the way, none of this is necessarily a problem with the detached comment, nor does it imply anything bad about your (i.e. the child commenter's) intent. Often the child comment has been posted for exactly the right reason—thoughtful conversation. But if it takes a step away from the original topic in a generic direction, or a flameprone direction, upvotes and replies often start pouring in, skewing the thread as a whole in a way that makes it less interesting.
In other words, this is not just the fault of the child commenter (and maybe not at all). It's a co-creation along with all the other repliers and upvoters.
The more we learn, the clearer it gets that we need to moderate not specific posts, but subthreads. Subthreads are the unit of HN comment moderation. (Edit: doesn't that mean—someone will ask—that you could maliciously derail/destroy a subthread by adding bad comments to it? No, because we can detach those. That's case (2) in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27132402.)
Understanding that online discussion gets less interesting as it gets more generic is one of the bedrock principles here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
EDIT: I wonder if trolls deliberately wait for and then target top main-threads, in order to maximize the blast radius of their trolling.
People also do the opposite - writing a toplevel comment to discuss (berate, more often than not) multiple other comments - 'I can't believe the nattering nabobs of negativism that have been commenting here, etc'.
In both cases, writing a good, non-repetitive, non-meta toplevel comment is probably better but it's more work and potentially unsatisfying - a lot of the time, a comment like that will in fact be lost in a big discussion.
Probably not on the busiest posts (though those are something of a conversational lost cause already), but on most typical discussions without excessive comments, yes.
I'll admit to tailing dang's comments periodically, or searching for specific terms when people challenge / inquire about my own takes on comments. (Most often in the case of dupe / non-dupe article submissions, occasionally others.)
Clickbait titles are de-baited. Indirect links are disintermediated. Divergent distracting comments are downweighted.
Much of my own interaction with the HN mod team (ask dang, I email fairly frequently, probably a few times a week) are with regard to link or title issues.
I'll also occasionally try to steer a discussion back on track with a top-level comment I hope more directly addresses the post than many early takes do. This isn't always successful, but I've been surprised several times where my own late-in-the discussion comment ends up highly-placed in the thread. One key is to really fight back against expressing frustration (the comments are usually born from an excess of that), and just lay out a strong case for an alternative take on what seems significant.
I actually did express that frustration out loud in this thread ... and dang commented on the initial-conditions aspect:
I'm not actually proposing this, but that makes me curious how well that could be modeled via deep learning.
We have a team of moderators and as mentioned before you can "smell" something brewing. The words, to whom they are directed, etc.
A couple of years ago we started using Perspective API [0], a Google service "Using machine learning to reduce toxicity online". We use the toxicity model, trained by Google and The NY Times. Basically we submit the text of posts and replies and receive a score. We do some account history calculations and if it's past a certain threshold then moderators receive a notification - we can't read all posts in our platform all the time but this helps a lot.
The community itself helps too, and the reporting tool is used when things happen that we aren't aware.
For example https://playvalorant.com/en-us/news/announcements/valorant-v...
> As part of a larger effort to combat disruptive behavior, Riot Games recently updated its Privacy Notice and Terms of Service to allow us to record and evaluate in-game voice communications when a report for that type of behavior is submitted—with the goal of kicking this off in VALORANT first.
I believe it would be quite possible. Text is a bit dryer to work with but has the advantage of being all text.
Not sure how well it's working out.
I hear constant stories about how "blunt instrument" these are, and how it's impossible to appeal.
the ycombinator web UI does not encourage real-time or even near-time responses.
- click on my user name
- click on comments
- search/scroll to this thread and see your reply
I don't get notified of comment replies like on reddit. there is no slack/email page of DMs/PMs.
I had no idea about this until someone mentioned it. Prior to that I couldn't be bothered very often to check my comments for replies. It was too many steps and made me feel narcissistic for doing all that just to see.
edit- spelling.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
Sure HN has its pains (and I'm an unconditional of the late n-gate site) but they don't come from moderation shenanigans.
I also appreciate the pedagogy I often see. Some participants here have never been actively moderated and dang takes the time to explain as if the moderated person was one of the 10000 of the day.
Respect and many thanks, dang.
Paul really should fund an AI startup focused on chatboard moderation based solely on learnings-from-dang.
Additionally, he tends to favor the original aggressor, ignoring the concept of instigation to fix the proximate cause of the negative interactions here. Don’t get caught punching second, in other words.
It’s classic utilitarianism; if 1% of users get shat upon by dang, and 99% in any way benefit from his negative behavior, I suppose the folks here would be alright with that?
Can you give an example? I just went through dang's comments in the last few days and found nothing of the sort, and it has not been my experience at all, unless posting an unpopular opinion counts as instigation. Dang's pattern, every time I've been witness to his moderation, is to cut the first comment that descends into incivility or flaming.
Conversations on HN sometimes get heated. Some people take people disagreeing with them as a personal attack and quickly descend into actual personal attacks in response. Those people may feel like they're being singled out by dang, but it's because they actually are misbehaving.
A pattern he follows very commonly is seen here [0]: "Can you stop doing $thing?" However, it's dang's opinion that $thing is occurring, and he makes zero effort to understand why $thing could even be happening, and further entertains zero challenges to his interpretation of what has taken place. It's, "stop doing $thing, which is definitely happening, or else I will ban you."
Here's another good example of dang handling moderation poorly [1]: he spends zero time explaining the situation, zero time listening to the perspective of the "accused", and simply, curtly, dismisses that person from the site.
Ironically, dang's intervention is often the most toxic behavior in a comment chain, and these examples are what I found in just the past two hours.
There are thousands, or more, people treated this way, and instead of concern, praise is constantly dumped on him, like what he's doing is some incredible or even desirable behavior! The assumption is the site is better off without these people he treats poorly on it, but I doubt any rigor has been placed on that assumption whatsoever.
I was 'danged' once, after I angrily responded to someone who made an outrageous comment to me, attacking me strongly for saying cheating was bad. Dang objected to my comment. I said, what the other guy said was much worse! Dang hadn't even read the other guy's comment, which seemed so unfair.
He explained to me that it doesn't matter what the other guy said. "Punching second" or in any order, is not ok on here. Read the comment guidelines. He said that being on HN is a continual exercise is not being triggered, in not commenting while angry. They were wise words which I think greatly improved my HN comments, or at least I don't do those triggered, snarky, cutting responses any more, or almost never. No matter what the other guy said. Silence is often the best response, or the only good one. That someone else is being an asshole on here is no reason to join them.
You are apparently fairly new here, and seem to have little idea of the massive number of comments written on HN each day. I looked at the first couple of pages of your recent comments, and most of them have a very unpleasant, hostile tone. You are in no position to criticize dang. Read the "In comments" section of the guidelines, the part starting "Be kind. Don't be snarky." A lot of your comments break them.
Any comment citing "newguidelines.html" should probably get flagged for review, for example.
I also am not new here, but imagine why I might seem to be...
A key move, and an utterly unique one to my knowledge, was having an extraordinary full time employee tending to it constantly.
Here's hoping it all lasts for as long as possible. Thanks dang.
One day I see dang write a comment that was really interesting about how threads tend to develop over time, like some kind of law of webforums.
I thought "ah ha! I'll go read a bunch of Dan's comments. I bet those are good."
But if you go look his profile is just nonstop very politely moderating people. All. The. Time.
Dan please write a book some time, I'd read it.
I also see from your Twitter reply that you feel HN hasn't necessarily been a great platform for your participation. I just want to counter that feeling with real-world result: I've read hundreds of your comments and at least a dozen of your submissions. I suspect HackerNews is actually a fantastically appropriate platform for you, and not an adversarial one.
At any rate, the disconnect between what I perceive as an outside observer vs. what you perceive as a "man in the arena"[0] is a fascinating phenomenon in its own right.
0: https://prisonist.org/quotes-we-love-theodore-roosevelt-man-...
> He has had a habit of silencing some long-standing members of HN
If anything, that shows excellent moderation skills. Everyone should abide by the same rules.
Some times they'd become very good at baiting other people into breaking the rules. Or they would writing extremely inflammatory comments in a pseudo-cordial writing style that looked friendly/naïve but was actually crafted to incite a flame war.
There was a lot of "You should know better" admonishing these provocateur forum members, but for many the only solution was to remove them from the forum completely.
I love what Dang refers to as HN's non-silowed nature. It is easy to find useful and fascinating discussions on any topic. When I have the time and energy, sometimes I dive in for a few hours. When I come up for air I'm tired but generally pleased with experience.
A common complaint here is that it ain't what it used to be. There may be a little more fluff now but when it's good - It's darn good.
The great surprise of the Moon Under Water is its garden. You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are little green tables with iron chairs round them. Up at one end of the garden there are swings and a chute for the children.
On summer evenings there are family parties, and you sit under the plane trees having beer or draught cider to the tune of delighted squeals from children going down the chute. The prams with the younger children are parked near the gate.
Many as are the virtues of the Moon Under Water, I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.
And though, strictly speaking, they are only allowed in the garden, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children—and therefore, to some extent, women—from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be.
The Moon Under Water is my ideal of what a pub should be—at any rate, in the London area. (The qualities one expects of a country pub are slightly different.)
I'm sure the Moon Under Water would treat newcomers well, though!
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Another feature of that pub I remember was a setup where patrons could dress up in Velcro vests, then jump onto a big trampoline and hurl themselves up as high as possible onto a Velcro wall where they stuck like flies. Fun times, if not Orwellian.
Other long term community members learn what sets this person off and avoid it, and so everything seems quiet for weeks until somebody unaware hits on just the wrong subject, and this old, seemingly respected member explodes at them.
This is problematic for a community. New people need to either learn to navigate this minefield, or decide that it's not worth it and leave. And a lot will definitely pick the second option.
I ended up banning just a few such people and I'd say things have improved greatly as a result. Yes, there's a loss in term of contribution from very skilled people, but if a single person sours the mood for several dozen, it's not a good tradeoff. And they tend to drive away other skilled people as well, who can easily leave and be welcome must anywhere else that doesn't require them to tiptoe around that one tricky person.
Meta: Is that an apostrophe as a username sigil? Where did it come from? Another instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17681886
It's a LISP-ism. It means don't evaluate the symbol before passing it.
It is tragic that we don't have yummyfajitas' or michaelochurch's takes which went against the grain and were probably interesting in some ways, but they in the end shot themselves in the foot by delivering their message in odiously-scented wrappings. Frequently employing ad hominem attacks, calling women names, etc. quickly evaporates the credibility of the person behind them, sours the culture of the community, and is just not a very good thing to do, irrespective of whatever validity or truth is being conveyed.
The person you and the comment next to me are talking about is not here to defend themselves. They are specifically not here to defend themselves because they aren't allowed to. The justification for them not being allowed to is because they talked badly about someone else. Yet, it is apparently accepted to talk badly about them.
Your are even saying that we shouldn't trust this person because they in your opnion engaged in ad hominem attacks. But by doing so you are arguably performing an ad hominem attack yourself. And while you can certainly make a meta argument against that it would be close enough for many not to touch it.
This is why many people leave. Not because it's the Internet. Most of us have been around that. But because it is bad version of it.
You might think this doesn't have real consequences so I will give you an example. Because of the environment on Hacker News there is a lack of successful Europeans. This in turn results in there being an overwhelming consensus that is less likely you make good amounts of money in Europe. But this often isn't the case if you know what to do. It is just that those who do either leave or stop talking about it. Which continues the existing narrative as the participants reality continues to match their opinions. While in reality their opinion may not really be supported.
An environment with one sided environment isn't harmless. It might actually give you a worse life. But the same argument as before also applies here. Those who appreciate this are the first to leave. Leaving those who stay blind to what is happening.
Who is this person and why was he banned?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026736
But it’s worth noting per Dang that sctb played role in building the data recovery system before it was needed — and mthurman helped deploy HN to AWS. Thanks sctb & mthurman!!
Dang’s comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031158
For who sctb & mthurman are, see:
https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over...
I once witnessed a Delta employee in ATL process a queue of customers, all with issues regarding their seat number. Without knowing too much about the process, it seemed to me that she took everyone's story and fixed the seating arrangement so that everyone would be seated together by group. I was impressed, but she doesn't get any applause for solving (well, approximating) an NP-complete problem, and I doubt she focused on math during her years in education, and certainly she won't think to write a blog focused on "Solving the N-passengers, K-groups problem 30 minutes before boarding time." Most importantly, she could have easily said "not my problem," but didn't.
That is anecdata but it does not stand alone. I regularly witness about 10% of customer service personnel giving it their all to represent their company and keep customers happy. They are the "dangs" of those organizations, and they keep everything running smoothly. So it would seem "few people" is not accurate. Instead it's an huge lower-middle (under)class cohort keeping capitalist dreams alive.
There's a specific term (Emotional Labor) coined by service workers to describe staying even-keeled when dealing with users/customers. That term wouldn't exist if "few people" grasped how hard that part of it is.
PG didn’t say that no one expends more effort than dang, he said that few people grasp the effort expended in moderating HN
To start from Paul G. saying "Thank you dang, ..." and end up at "...(under)class cohort keeping capitalist dreams alive" seems like stretching a particular framework of thought past the point where it usefully describes people.
Give him a nice long vacation already, the responsibility should probably be split among a 5-10 person team anyway.
You must be referring to Facebook and Twitter.
He's inspired me to approach many more social interactions that I'd historically be annoyed or short with someone as a teaching moment that can be, for lack of a better term, leveraged into a happy outcome for both participants. It was something I never really considered before.
We're all better off for having these interactions with him. Thanks so much, Mr. G!
That and other detailed statistics are only shown for users who opt in, but anyone motivated can process a database dump locally, even using XTools itself, which is open source. Edit history can reveal a lot of information about a user, so this an inevitable privacy problem for any scrapable site.
[1] https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-timecard/en.wikipedia.org/Jimb...
Twitter is a bunch of pigs wallowing in a pit of mud by comparison. You could put a million dangs in there and they would still wind up as muddy as everyone else at the end of the day. Making twitter less crap likely requires some orbital bombardment analogies.
People would cluster themselves into groups with consistent values and you would just need some moderators for minor adjustments.
However, in strategic terms, I think HN has failed to maintain a good comment signal-to-noise ratio over the past several years. For instance it used to be that "funny" or entertaining type of low-effort comments would be strongly discouraged with downvotes; at some point in the past few years it has become very common and... REminiscent of another social site that I'm not supposed to draw comparisons to due to HN guidelines.* Now it's common to see jokes and puns do quite well.
Fundamentally, to maintain a board's culture you need to encourage people to "lurk more" to get acclimated to the board's culture before participating. In other words you need to throttle/retard new users' participation somewhat.
I do recall at one point a push to increase commenting by removing comment average karma in user profiles. (Some) people used to withhold commenting unless they felt they had a real banger because it would throw off their ratio. It also used to be new user signups were only open occasionally rather than always available.
My hypothesis on where it went wrong is cost-free upvotes. Downvotes have always been gated behind a karma threshold, but any new account can upvote whatever it wants. Floods of new accounts thoughtlessly upvoting the types of comments they upvote on other sites will easily outpace the old timers' downvotes on that same content. Over time, this small change in karma dynamics shifts the board culture.
* Like the guideline wording, dang frequently brushes away this critique out of hand, but as someone who goes long periods between visiting HN regularly, it's very obvious to me. I think you could quantify it if you took random samples of HN comments from various time slices and noted the quantity of low-effort comments.
i've actually been thinking about how to solve this problem lately, at least for myself. the hn api doesn't look like much fun to work with however.
[0]: that's not to say that i don't appreciate dang, i do, but it's cloying to say the least.
There are a lot of 'backfiring sums' like that in internet forums.
i do think a dampening function on repetitive messages/sentiments would be a net-good however, since repetitiveness is not where the interesting/insightful points tend to be.
Re intent: many people underestimate good intent in these cases. My experience interacting with users is that they're mostly trying to say good and helpful things, even when what they actually say is bad and unhelpful.
totally agree that most people have good intentions most of the time, but i'm skeptical of motivations in a public context. intentions and motivations cross purposes all the time, and cheap social points, like junk food, are nearly irresistable to our evolutionarily-culled pro-social chemical pathways.
Not joking, we are trying to build a large online community now and I would love to pick his brain on balancing incentives, encouraging curiosity, having equanimity, and all kinds of aspects in “practical sociology”.
I think his in-the-trenches experience would benefit many people trying to build and maintain healthy online communities.
Thanks dang!!
More likely to disseminate best practices much sooner than waiting for a mission-critical operator to have time to write it themselves.
I understand fully PG thanking him publicly for his effort and the pats on the back (by others here) but let's face it it's a job in the end and he is doing his job.
Many thanks to dang for this ever wonderful forum, the best on the Internet!
[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2022/07/lobste.rs-will-become-an-ech...
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
This is literally why it exists.
This thread is bizarre and cult like.
I seriously wish the monthly "Who's Hiring" and "Who Wants to be Hired?" were a more structured feature of the site, but maybe that's the charm of them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Know_What_You_Got_(Til...
[1] (an unhealthy addiction to an orange website)
I think shadowbanning is unjust, and if is someone is violating the rules nonstop they should be made aware of it through notice and an actual ban.
Shadowbanning is reserved for spammers and for new accounts that show signs of abusing the site, e.g. by trolling or egregiously breaking the site guidelines, or if there's evidence that they're related to past accounts that have been abusing the site. It's not a good idea to use explicit banning in all of these cases (for different reasons).
Here are some longer past explanations:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686672
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288858
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666742
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20289994
This system has drawbacks—banning new accounts means guessing—by definition, there isn't a lot of information to go on—and we guess wrong sometimes. But we try to correct those errors later. Btw, if anyone notices a banned account that shouldn't be banned, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com—we've unbanned many accounts that way.
In fact I'm just working on a ban review system that will make it much easier for mods to track banned accounts that are still posting and unban the ones who are making good contributions (whether because we guessed wrong when banning them, or because they've reformed since having been banned).
On rare occasion I've seen [banned] accounts as well with showdead on.
Weird thing I've noticed is [dead] accounts that aren green tend to be typical troll, spam, or people who can't calm down during certain discussions. They may even have some comments still love.
[banned] accounts on the other hand tend to be completely deragned. They seem almost obsessed. Despite being banned they continue to make essay posts about whatever it is that got them hanne over large periods of time. Could be bots, but the complexity and variety of the language in the posts tends to be moderately complex.
I've definitely seen "[dead]" on accounts which, if you go into their post history, were told by dang that they were being banned.
AFAIK shadowbanning on HN means your comments default to "dead", as if they had been flagged. You can see them if you enable "showdead" in your profile, and if people vouch for them, they can become visible again. See Terry Davis' comment history for examples (this is the only shadowbanned account I know of): https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis - if you look a few pages in, you'll see some live comments of him talking about the early days of Ticketmaster and such.
To me this seems like a better solution than simply kicking people out who are unable to uphold the minimum guidelines necessary to engage in reasonably civil discourse. What would you suggest as an alternative?
Shadowbanning might be effective against actual spammers but preventing the user from seeing that they were banned removes even more accountability from the moderation than other tools which makes shadowbanning particularly prone to abuse as well as mistakes that won't get fixed. I think it's pretty dishonest to punish someone without telling them they are being punished.
It's also worth pointing out that shadowbanning is more effective against good faith users than malicious users since all it takes is to check using a disconnected session to uncover the ruse - something that will hardly be difficult for a motivated malicious user.
I would disagree with the form of banning you are describing, however.
It seems that if the politics meet a certain criteria, they are allowed ad nauseam. You also see where certain names are allowed to say things where others are chastised for the rebuttal of said things.
You just missed them.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026571
HN is a tiny forum which basically runs on a single machine with a single backup. There are surely only a few people monitoring it. It’s used by about ~1 million people a day, and nobody really “relies” on HN.
GitHub, Facebook, Google, AWS etc. are massive clusters of over 1000 servers spread across continents, with multiple failure modes and run by many DevOps. Many people and services rely on them being up. They’re used by billions each day.
Yet HN has more uptime than these behemoths, and way more uptime than e.g. Slack. It’s also faster, even though it’s only one server. HN went down for 2 (?) hours. HN also promptly posts why it went down. In this case because both the main and backup server failed.
Of course HN is definitely more reliable because it’s only one server. But it’s still impressive and shows that you can reach a large audience with a simple setup and few resources. Maybe if Google, Facebook, AWS, etc. found more straightforward solutions they too could have more uptime.
That's because HN does a lot less, and is a lot simpler.
I think that’s a feature not a bug.
Complexity is not a virtue. HN has a lot of depth when you look beyond its interface. The abstractions don't always have to exist in code, operations or UI.
What % of the Slack feature set is actually used by a majority of its users at least once a month?
They temporarily stood up an AWS instance from a backup, and are working on a permanent fix.
Why anyone would expect people to have the same attitude towards that as Facebook is beyond me.
If Cloudflare, AWS or Google goes down, it affects millions of people directly and often financially. If HN goes down, we simply find another way to waste time.