Hacker News Reader

Comment by desperadovisa | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News is in absolutely no way a “masterpiece”; it’s a site, one of many, that aggregates articles, sorted by popularity. Because it’s run by the largest startup accelerator in the world, it attracts people other sites don’t.

The only special thing about HN is its association with YC. That’s it.

But people have this inherent need to worship just about anything, so we get self congratulatory articles like this one.

Maybe the fact that this article does well here will make a few of you see through the bull crap? Probably not, but a girl can dream…

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HN's active but not obtrusive moderation is pretty special. dang's gift for patient explanations is quite special. Not unique, but worth note because its so rare and worth emulation.

No, dang is objectively terrible at moderation. Just look at his comments history to understand how bad he is at dealing with issues. Zero effort to mediate or perspective take; dang’s first impression is the only view that matters, regardless of how wrong or misinformed.

Dang worship is just one example of how HN is no better than any other social media, and the fact that he still has a job is an indication it may be meaningfully worse.

I would say he is open to "the wrong and misinformed" in the hope that they become less misinformed, at least.

How are you so certain you've the correct position on anything, if you can't consider other points of view? How can you understand others actions if you will not listen to their attempts to explain their motivations?

? How is dang so certain he (has) the correct position on anything, if he can't consider other points of view? How can he understand others actions if he will not listen to their attempts to explain their motivations?

He doesn't do any of that, he just states some basic, "Stop doing <value judgement about user's behavior>." No discussion, no insight gathering, nothing.

He's a garbage moderator. You can literally observe it in his comment history [0]. His most recent comment (at time of writing)[1] exemplifies this perfectly:

> You don't have to agree with anyone's views but this style of argument is deathly to the curious conversation we want here.

No, it is not. This is simply wrong, and "this style" is dismissive and rude. But that's not up for debate, as dang has decreed it so. The only reason he writes anything at all here is to explain why the person is, to him, wrong. Zero attempt whatsoever to understand an alternative perspective.

Awful, terrible moderation skills.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32640951

Part of the point of having a moderator is to give the community a mechanism to make quick determinations and to keep tendentious meta-debates out of the main threads (meta-stories like this being an obvious exception). If you want to debate the moderators, mail hn@ycombinator.com.

Nothing about a moderator necessitates quickness, and what may be tendentious to you is not to someone else. In fact, quickness is a negative trait of a moderator, when their decisions are as impactful as limiting speech.

And nobody said anything about debating anyone, I'm wholly uninterested in dang's perspective at this point, he's made his lack of ability in this area perfectly clear.

It's also perfectly clear how little is in his toolbox to enforce his decisions however, so I suppose it's mostly a wash.

I disagree with basically everything you said here. But, much more importantly: if you're wholly uninterested in Dan's perspective on things, this place is probably not a great hang for you.

It’s been a fine “hang” for me for 13 years, it’ll be fine for another 13, most likely.

Also I think it's the literal definition of hubris to disagree with, "what may be tendentious to you is not to someone else" but I'm guessing you don't really care about hypocritical shit like that.

I think anything I say to you is going to generate a snarky, dismissive response, and so am opting to keep things simple.

> I think anything I say to you is going to generate a snarky, dismissive response, and so am opting to keep things simple

I feel no such compunction, so: This guy seems to be hiding behind a new handle; for what reason(s), we can speculate.

13 years, you say? That's not what your profile says — did you feel some need to create a new identity?

The idea that you have to share the same politics or perspectives as the mod is the problem, and promotes walled gardens and groupthink. The exact phenomenon of mods killing anything they disagree with is what killed reddit.

You do not have to share the same politics, and, moreover, you don't even know what his politics are. How I know that is, I don't even know what his politics are, and I've talked to him a bunch and am a little unhealthily curious about them.

I can't speak to what you know, but I can speak to what sometimes reveals itself.

If it's the case that you don't have to share the same politics, then please explain why:

> if you're wholly uninterested in Dan's perspective on things, this place is probably not a great hang for you

> keep tendentious meta-debates out of the main threads

How is removing "tendentious meta-debates" aka "controversial topics not directly related to the main thread" compatible with "On-topic: Anything .. interesting ... anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" or even "seasoned talking points aren't on topic here"?

(though it does match "Avoid unrelated controversies".. Guess those are never interesting to good hackers?)

> If you want to debate the moderators

I think the issue is they don't want to debate the mods. Or specifically, for the mods to debate them. I feel there's a difference moderating the meta-aspects of a debate (style, relevance etc), and participating in a debate.

You're basically lawyering the site guidelines against the person who wrote and maintains the site guidelines (not me; I'm just paraphrasing them). That's neither interesting or productive. Dan has explained over and over again, in great detail, why tendentious meta-debates are toxic to the project HN is trying to run. You are, of course, welcome not to participate in that project! But trying to convince me that the project is something other than what Dan says it is seems silly. Not to put too fine a point on it: I don't care what you think the project is, and I deeply care what Dan thinks it is.

By "lawyering" you mean pointing out the contradictions? Sure. You say thats not interesting, but clearly I think it is.

If by project you mean whatever dang says it is, then sure it's what dang says it is. If you mean a community forum, no, dang just had an opinion. The fact that you agree with that opinion and so don't care to be convinced otherwise don't change that it's just an opinion.

> Dan has explained over and over again, in great detail

There may have been an explanation, but no discussion - but would you just argue that this wouldn't be interesting or productive? You're satisfied so why would you care about inconsistent modding?

> he just states some basic, "Stop doing <value judgement about user's behavior>."

Very often it's "stop breaking the guideline", or "stop participating in flamewars" - so not much to go on. Often the next comment is "which guideline did I break" or "What do you mean by flamewar/why is this a flamewar?" - which goes unanswered.

Other times, users will participate in blatant trolling, or obvious (non subjective) rule breaking and get far more detail/response.

It feels like dang/mods aren't exactly sure of what the moderation rules should be, so simply don't answer difficult questions..

That said, what is the benchmark for moderation? Reddit? The internet standard is so low, HN is great in comparison.

I agree with this, although my memory is probably selective (as it usually is for authorities).

But "the fact that he still has a job" is too far - HN should rethink it's moderation for the greater good, but HN will hardly die otherwise.

The only other forum most people know is reddit, which is mostly a braindead wasteland. In contrast to that, Hacker News is a masterpiece.

Unfortunately that’s probably true, despite the facts that

a) Reddit is a gigantic mixed bag of quality, and thinking Reddit is “all bad” is admitting to not understanding how to use it, and

b) being unable to understand that the category isn’t actually “forums” is sad. You can get this level of quality (which is to say, not the real draw of HN in the first place) by directly visiting the sites posted here.

a) Any community I ever found on reddit is, over time, infested by mediocrity, non relevant content and (leftist political & identity) hugboxing. Reddit attracts averageness and lowest common denominator content and that is just terribly boring and off putting. I really don't know how to put this in a way that doesn't appear arrogant. In the end the best summary I can offer is: Reddit is a garbage dump. You can find diamonds in a garbage dump, but don't expect it to happen often.

b) Hacker News and subreddits are variants of forum though? I understand your idea of being able to get this yourself on the linked pages, but I have to say I really enjoy the preselection hacker news users do for me.

On (a): Reddit can be extremely useful as a search engine. Adding site:reddit.com to a search for, say, a product or troubleshooting, will generally give you better results than the Google default. It's also pretty good for search for local issues (e.g., "Where can I find X in Y?") and for quick answers that are usually buried under a whole blog post otherwise for SEO purposes (e.g., "How do I unlock secret X in game Y?"). The latter Google default search will give you blog posts that get to the answer after several paragraphs of "Game Y is a game full of secrets, which is why gamers really love it" and "Secret X is really a game-breaking weapon that will make your character extremely strong for the last half of the game."

In short, Reddit serves a purpose that Google used to serve.

> In short, Reddit serves a purpose that Google used to serve.

That's true actually. I usually use google + reddit to find "real people (TM)" testimonials for medical treatments that can't be found otherwise.

a) I cannot emphasize this enough, but... So. Does. HN. It's actually a lot worse here, because it's faux intellectualism. The "hugboxing" here is so much more egregious, because people think they're above it.

b) The link aggregation and the conversations are two distinct features, and only some tiny percentage of good content actually makes its way here, and even when it does, HN is extremely temporal, so if you "miss" it, you're SOL.

But I really, truly, emphatically, want to make something clear: HN users are not in any way immune to any of the things you seem to take issue with over on Reddit. Your problem isn't with HN or Reddit, your problem is with people, as what you've listed is true and inherent in any collection of humans interacting with one another (specific ideology notwithstanding).

I do enjoy a good forum, but most of the good content I see posted here isn't from a forum, and my favorite forum I'm most interested in (lambda the ultimate) is almost dead. Together, that means HN ends up having the most interesting content and discussion for the topics I care about that updates frequently.

That wasn't always the case, and there are still a few good sub-reddits to prove this.

In the case of Reddit, it was purposefully trashed by its new owners who decided that anything less than a east-coast-lib groupthink would prevent growth, or something - or maybe they are just incompetent. Feels a similar story with Stack-Overflow.

reddit is infinitely curate-able. if you remove all the default subs and sub to communities about topics you care about, it is a much better experience (except for large communities; those are trash, but large forums back in the day were also trash)

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