> seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives.
Would be great to see you being more active on HN again!
Would be great to see you being more active on HN again!
If you're known to be a regular user of a forum, then when someone says something about you and you don't reply, it reads as a tacit admission that they're correct. And when you write essays people say all kinds of things about you. The combination is a disaster. Forum users can sense that you're compelled to respond, and it encourages them to pick fights with you.
Back when I used to moderate HN, hitting publish on an essay was usually followed by several hours of saying various forms of "No, what I said was..." Life is much better now that I never look at the HN threads on them.
Happy to see your post here though!
Edit: and while we have you here briefly, Happy Holidays!
But just because the new owner makes exceptions to his ridiculous anti-free-speech policy for high-profile supporters doesn't make it better.
In fact, selective enforcement of batshit policies makes it all much worse.
Also never observed a problem between mods and other users in other Sub-Reddits. Maybe because mods on Reddit are not that visible?
Yeah I don't think it's possible to escape the criticism even without taking a position. That said, of the two options, I agree that not wading in may have less of a chilling effect and thus encourages more interaction.
It gets more complicated behind the scenes. If you're making a lot of content moderation decisions without disclosing them, you may be introducing bias without realizing it. Eventually people are going to be hip to that. Platforms are rife with this right now: selective invisibility, visibility filtering, ranking, visible to self, reducing, deboosting, and "disguising a gag" are all words platforms use internally or externally to justify non-disclosure of content moderation decisions. Without public awareness of the existence of these secretive moderation decisions, administrators may feel they have to use them in order to compete with other forums.
I think transparent moderation is the sustainable way forwards for social media, and I recently made my case for that here:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/shadowbans-are-bad-for-discours...
Reddit is mostly anonymous, which can make people think they can do whatever they want as moderators/users without any repercussions. Of course that isn't true: all of our actions impact our own behavior, attitude etc.
> Also never observed a problem between mods and other users in other Sub-Reddits. Maybe because mods on Reddit are not that visible?
It happens all the time. These r/Libertarian [1] and r/LibertarianUncensored [2] threads may be the most succinct examples of how far users/mods will go to make their voices heard. I list many more in my talk [3].
[1] https://archive.ph/O0GN8#selection-2701.0-2707.56
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LibertarianUncensored/comments/uotv...
[3] https://shadowmoderation.com/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
It was so simple in those days.
Except for that time before they got html escaping figured out and some joker put an unclosed <BLINK> tag in their title, and the entire blogoverse started blinking.
People value freedom a little less than convenience.
Like, no specific solution or anything from me, I get why you make that decision and not trying to convince you to change it – just wanted to post a comment of appreciation I guess.