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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.