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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, but as I learned when I was running HN, being a regular user of a forum (which the moderator necessarily is) and writing essays are fundamentally incompatible.

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.

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Rule #1 of any forum is don't moderate the forum that you are active on. Musk is finding out the hard way why this is the case.

Happy to see your post here though!

Edit: and while we have you here briefly, Happy Holidays!

pg will almost certainly be reinstated because he's a high-profile supporter.

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.

Yes, but it would be folly to continue to invest into a forum that is run in such a capricious way.

Huh, I'm one of several mods for a Sub-Reddit. Works fine. Only things that changed are a) my own comment quality standard is higher and b) the way I read other comments. Now, I scan comments for rule infractions, which lessens my reading enjoyment a bit.

Also never observed a problem between mods and other users in other Sub-Reddits. Maybe because mods on Reddit are not that visible?

Depends on the subject matter as well. I've moderated a - large - forum for years and in the beginning I was also a user of the site. That quickly led to people figuring out that the moderator is a part of the scene and so you get people that try to get into your good book and others that try to set each other up. Every word you write gets lawyered over and so on. If your Sub-Reddit doesn't have those problems count yourself lucky. But personally I think that the way dang here does it is perfect (see: sucking up ;) ), he only enters the conversation to explain his moderation actions, but does not actually take a position on any of the issues discussed, thus leading to perceived impartiality (he still gets plenty of flak but imo that is undeserved).

> (he still gets plenty of flak but imo that is undeserved)

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...

> Huh, I'm one of several mods for a Sub-Reddit. Works fine.

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's funny you mention /r/libertarian x) I was shadow-banned for saying (verbatim) "Imposing your will through violence is always illegitimate" (the context was Chile's 1973 coup).

Can't we all just go back to syndicating RSS?

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.

Agreed, but centralized services will always be easier to use and people drift toward the easiest solution.

People value freedom a little less than convenience.

You should check out Radiopaper (radiopaper.com), which was designed to address this dynamic: when someone sends you a message or comments on something you wrote, their comment is only visible to you and remains unpublished until/unless you reply.

HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31210680

Hello! I am the CEO and cofounder of Radiopaper. Thanks for mentioning us. The mechanism you describe is indeed one of the core features of the platform. The effect is to distributes moderation decisions to those most immediately affected

I might be stating the obvious here, but it's just sad that loud negative minority deprieved everyone else of your participation. I learned a ton from your essays and would be happy to see you actively commenting on HN.

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.

@dang does a great job moderating HN. Perhaps he should reach out to Elon and share advice?

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