Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

If I post CSAM on HN I am 100% going to be reported and sent to jail. HN has only 2-3 mods, yet I don't see a plethora of old men's schlongs on here.

Yet Omegle made more money and had more users than HN ever would, but consistently failed at moderation.

> small companies are not allowed to participate if they are not rich enough

It's been open knowledge to anyone who's been in middle and high school since 2010 (like yours truly) that Omegle is filled with creepy old guys.

There are plenty of small social media startups from that era that never had as much of a pedo presence as Omegle.

View on HN

> HN has only 2-3 mods, yet I don't see a plethora of old men's schlongs on here.

HN doesn't even allow text formatting changes beyond monospace and italics, much less posting pictures or video.

Even without moderation, you'd only be at risk of ASCII art schlongs.

HN allows links, yet I haven't seen any X-rated or X-rating adjacent links on here. It's a nontrivial moderation problem.

Do you browse "new," do you have showdead on?

Hah, rewind. There's literally a porn site on the front page right now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38213707

Like the Omegle one, its a post-shutdown explanation, not porn media, at the link.

Aleph said "or adjacent," and if one follows the link at the end of the article, they get... porn.

A few quick searches suggests to me that Omegle had more users -- 73 million monthly versus maybe 5 million or so on HN -- but they were only worth $5 million dollars.

Hacker News is not and never has been a "business" in its own right. It's part of the business model of a VC fund -- Y Combinator -- and Forbes indicates they were worth $5 billion as of 2021.

Also, I don't think we know how many people moderate HN and never have.

I don't work here. I just hang here sometimes and have for years. I don't have reliable info.

But I am pretty sure you have no idea what you are talking about.

> It's part of the business model of a VC fund -- Y Combinator

It's part of YC but I can confidently say only around 4-5 people are working on it including moderation. I can also say confidently that more resources are spent by YC on Bookface and their own internal BI tools than HN.

According to this comment, it had 30 moderators in 2010 when it was a lot smaller:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1837288

It's source page gives a 404 "not found" error.

The current official mod in charge pretty consistently says "no moderators did x."

This handle of mine only dates to 2017, but I originally joined in 2009, so I have no idea how long you have been hanging here, but I would be really shocked if they needed 30 moderators in 2010 and now have literally one guy doing all the moderation work by himself entirely.

I also doubt that people really in the know are posting here with "insider" info that wasn't cleared by staff.

It's not my business. I don't feel they need to tell me such info. But I have no reason to believe your uncited assertion that you can say X "with confidence" is reliable info of any sort.

Back in 2009 many of those mods were posting stories / pinning stories. The flagging software wasn't as advanced. There are people with mod power not getting paid because of trust/history.. if they count in your 30 number perhaps. I'm on my 'X' number account as well

Omegle's video chat had an overzealous AI that would ban you if you showed too many skin coloured pixels for years, and actively cooperated with global law enforcement and the Centre for Missing/Exploited Children. The idea that they just allowed their site to be flooded with predators and went "Eh, we're making money" is wrong and borderline slanderous.

>yet I don't see a plethora of old men's schlongs on here.

if you remember from some months ago, the HN filter has like 66 thousand sites that get auto-filtered. I wouldn't even be surprised if your comment is delayed if you have a link and it isn't from a whitelisted site, or a greylisted site (an imgur image can have a variety of things that you want to check first). When something amiss does get through, enough commenters can flag the content and have it temporarily unviewable until a mod can get to it.

That's hard to do with Omeagle's more intimate setting, and of course live streaming yourself.

>It's been open knowledge to anyone who's been in middle and high school since 2010 (like yours truly) that Omegle is filled with creepy old guys.

may as well expand that to the rest of the internet. Most social media don't work off of live chats, so that's a huge pain point in Omeagle's favor.

And to be frank, they do. They just have more moderation to control that. Wasn't uncommon to have ANY link comment delayed for such reason, if it wasn't outright banned. Words can only do so much damage.

Those are two different things. Men's schlongs are not csam and you can run into enough of those things on other sites like reddit or a dating site. The reason why you don't see it here is no one posts images because they are not shown. Links are checked. Plenty try to spam and are caught by mods or the automated system.

The communities are very different and attract different crowds. The most dangerous sites are sites that connect groups who wouldn't connect in real life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com