When I encounter egregiously toxic posts, I email our lone mod warrior, Dang (hn@ycombinator.com) to ensure he has the opportunity to review and take whatever action is appropriate.
The daily post volume on HN is so high, it's challenging (to the point of being impossible) to moderate it all alone. Plus it's a generally thankless, horrifyingly soul crushing job. So I try to help out where I can, when I'm not the one causing the trouble :p :cry:
IMO HN would do well to ban political and social-movement posts entirely.
- When the statement is obvious, you mine as well not say it at all. On a lot of Reddit threads every upvoted comment is basically some variation of “This”, “Yep”, “I agree” (sometimes literally those). It’s absurd, there’s no discussion and the entire point of the comments section is wasted. (Honestly, a lot of Reddit is just the same posts and arguments over and over)
- When the opinion actually deserves nuance. When people throw around phrases like “the US is a third-world country”, “Google is an awful company only focused on greed”, “never trust your employer”. No, these statements aren’t 100% true, Google is a greedy company but it really isn’t just a money-making machine, it provides a search engine and mail and office software and video platform that you probably use. Additionally, when the statements are political and derogatory (“all X group is bad”), you start to criticize people who don’t deserve the criticism.
That is to say, a lot of "nuanced" arguments are just as morally emotive as short punchy ones. The latter might be less persuasive, but I'm not sure many people are changing their minds on moral or ethical debates these days anyway.
It's not always about changing your mind. Nuanced opinions help people understand issues better. If you write a long post talking about value driven at scale at Google vs a predatory advertising market, you can help folks understand, say, what a Google competitor would need to harness to compete effectively. But when you just say "Google is a scourge to this planet", nobody comes away from the conversation better informed and the poster gets tons of HN karma for posting the median view.
Moral opinions are tricky because they feed directly into and out of concepts like integrity, fidelity and quality, which are favorites on HN and can be discussed technically as well as morally. But we don't really learn much about that razor edge in general education so it's not as easily avoided.
I think the real cause of what you're observing is that users on HN go through cycles of enculturation, which can include being modded by dang (or challenged/flagged by other users) for crossing the line.
I used to feel frustrated that HN is very limited in its scope of what's allowed -- "curiosity only" which often excludes issues that really matter to me. It can take a while for users to really get that here. But on the other hand, it has allowed an extremely unique anonymous online community to thrive in its own way, and keep us coming back out of curiosity and a desire to learn.
I think we're reaching the next phase of the Internet, where big platform influence wanes, and where hopefully small communities figure out how to better govern themselves against nefarious actors.
We should lean on many of the older (proven) community standards again in online communities, and bring back displaying BOTH upvote and downvote data like we used to see... We also need to emphasize more choice and less algorithmic control over what trends on sites (from a "customer satisfaction" perspective). Letting real human readers decide what's relevant and best...
The only way to effectively manage a horrible inauthentic user plague/threat is by crowd sourcing real and authentic human beings that have a solid stake in maintaining positive order. Also, avoid embedding ads in everything as well as selling promotional services... It really does morally corrupt sites and apps.
Have you considered the possibility that the reason the myth is pervasive is because it's true, and over time HN is becoming more and more like reddit? It seems to me if the users continually complain about the same problem, maybe there's something there. "No, it's the users that are wrong!" requires a lot more than handwaving if you want me to take you seriously. As someone who's been using HN for years, I absolutely believe it becomes more like reddit over time.
Let's call low-effort comments what they are and make the conversations a little simpler.
That said, it's easy to be critical and hard to be constructive. I still come to HN regularly so there's obviously something to it. I'm not pretending to have the magic bullet to these problems (some of which I believe are fundamental/intractable).
EDIT: I find it ironic this post has fallen off the first page of HN before I finished this comment, despite having many comments and being something I find interesting.
That being said, this is a forum for VC and startup talk among other things, so it would be pretty surprising if there wasn't some astroturfing at play. Self-promotion comes with the territory. The mods are doing their best but to some extent it's in the game.
Finally, there's no irony about this no longer being on the front page. When I first clicked into this thread, I was surprised it was FP still, because it had twice as many comments as votes and that usually trips the flamewar detector. I think folks are generally unaware of the systems that make HN tick, and that can make the experience pretty confusing.
Sure there is. It's an interesting conversation to me and it's being pushed away from the front page. I didn't say it was foul play, I said it was ironic. The algorithms are so fearful of controversy they push away interesting topics.
Also, I've emailed the mods many times before. My experiences have been mixed.
That's just one of the tradeoffs. HN optimizes for curiosity, which does sometimes mean using blunt automated tools to fend off negative subjects.
Fundamentally, I think over-meta-commenting on the state of HN is considered boring here (at least by the mods), since it's been covered so many times before.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob[0] illusion[1], as[2] old[3] as[4] the[5] hills[6].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633099
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657
I get that quoting a request on the site info page could come across as modding you, but that wasn't my intent.
It might be an interesting conversation to have: has HN trailed Reddit over time in some of its more negative aspects? The guidelines dismissing this I think is wrong.
Reddit became very homogenized because of how quickly the left wing activists were to downvote, report, flag, etc. It made it impossible to have any discussion where you were right of far-left. A lot of those users have made their way over to HN, where it's even easier to have multiple accounts.
Yesterday someone posted a link to CBS News article about a Chipotle being closed after the workers tried to unionize. The article was very matter of fact and sparse. No editorial, no details about what sort of negotiations might have broken down. There was little to discuss about the article and I suspect it was posted by someone naively sympathetic to any labor organization effort trying to spread fodder to label Chipotle as a union-buster. The article still only has 17 comments. I commented asking why this was posted to HN and my comment was flagged in less than 30 seconds. So I commented again, and someone replied that its pertinent to startups because of how automation will cause job losses. The news article did not mention this. My second comment was flagged shortly thereafter.
HN will keep becoming like reddit because there is no recourse for the activists flagging comments or downvoting something they disagree with to hell. HN was already poorly moderated in that there is one moderator. This trend will continue and even the people who might agree with the activist will get bored and leave since there will be no intellectually stimulated conversation to have.
I'm not sure where the honest people go next. Maybe I'll just go outside, its pleasant out.