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Comment by zblevins | Hacker News Reader

I agree with what you're saying about SV, especially the military-industrial types. I'm not entirely sure what the makeup of HN demographics is, and would like to know. I have a suspicion that it's not just folks in SV. I also should have clarified more. In my opinion, the discourse here is more civil than on other platforms. I would suggest that has something to do with a combination of education and niche interests that attract a different user base. So maybe not in terms of factual correctness, but certainly in terms of the ability to have a civil conversation.

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I think you are like a fish who isn't aware of the water it's swimming in.

HN doesn't need much moderation, because the discourse is so civil here [narrator voice: because of the good moderation].

At scale, the long term community civility balance point is likely dominated by the average user's willingness to change their behavior as a result of peer feedback.

The HN userbase, feedback tools, karma-level-locked tools, and new users' personalities seem to create decent outcomes.

Which is to say, if someone acts like an asshat, folks let them know (either through downvotes, flags, or replies), and they modify their behavior to be closer to the community norm.

That said, I'm aware I don't see a lot of the most egregious stuff the Good Ship Dang torpedoes. Or what I expect are non-zero repeat trolls.

And honestly, the fact is that outside of very nerdy street cred, there's little incentive to actively manage discourse for commercial purposes on HN.*

* Outside of, you know, cloudflare tailscale rust (any other crawler alarms I can trip)

That’s a rather reductionist and slightly disparaging point of view. Moderation has its place I never said it didn’t, but do you really think that moderation is the only thing keeping this place from being 4chan? I think you have one deeply entrenched opinion and are ignoring that these are very different platforms.

HN is heavily moderated through a number of mechanisms: explicit community guidelines, community moderation (through voting), and active automated and manual moderation.

I think all of this working in conjunction is why it has remained a pretty great community for almost two decades. And I think that's a really impressive feat. I don't think it was accomplished via "a combination of education and niche interests that attract a different user base".

Indeed, I think HN has gotten better over time, even somewhat so in absolute terms, but very starkly relative to the deterioration of everything else. For example, back in the day, when twitter was first getting big in tech, a lot of people felt that it was a healthier place to discuss those topics than HN. I was never completely convinced of that, and have always been more active here than on twitter, but it was at least a very reasonable thing to think for awhile, IMO. But now I think it would be pretty crazy to think that twitter is healthier than HN. Similarly with similar communities on reddit.

I dunno, maybe there are some healthier spaces on mastodon or blue sky or threads or something now, but at least to me, HN has maintained a fairly stable fairly decent level of discourse for a very long time, and I don't think it is a result of luck or magic, but rather of hard and tireless work moderating the community.

Yea, I’ve become more aware of this since yesterday. I also think I should have provided way more context to what I was saying. I believe I came off as being against moderation but I’m not, I do think there is something unique about the user base just from the quality of content I see compared to other spaces, but I digress. I appreciate your thoughts and it gave me something to think about.

Yeah, and I probably should have figured out a more tactful way to make the point I was making. I wanted it to be more like a "you're one of today's lucky 10,000!"[0] to point out that I think you've been swimming in water without knowing it[1], but I think it ended up just being condescending.

0: https://xkcd.com/1053/

1: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ (kind of blog spam, but this is the only place I found that has the full transcript, the audio, and other useful links)

I thought that’s what the reference was. I think it all worked out in the end.

Last I ran the numbers, which was quite a few years ago, about 10% of HN posts were coming from IP addresses correlated to Silicon Valley (well, the Bay Area with a relatively wide radius). About 50% were coming from the US, and so on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 (March 2018)

I should check again.

Thanks @dang. Turned on showdead. I will say that I was completely unaware of the moderation efforts here and appreciate having this pointed out to me. I like this option too. As far as transparency goes I don’t think it gets much better than this.

Thanks for this!

Showdead doesn’t work on stories AFAIK, just comments.

For stories on the front page, I made https://orangesite.sneak.cloud.

Of course it works on stories. There are eight right now on https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

Oh, I meant on the frontpage. I am quite curious about stuff “popular” enough to make it out of newest and into the top30, but off topic/rulebreaking enough to get nuked (either by mods or by flags).

i'm not from silly valley, but its the dominant voice here.

some of my downvotes are from bad tone, overreaction, hyperbole... some are because of the silly valley culture not realising they are a bunch of deluded maniacs, or just producing absolute garbage products.

its mostly the former.

as for demographics... well, i'm a single data point, but HN has a wide reach. its why a lot of us are here imo.

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