Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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I've posted dozens of comments on these issues in recent weeks (I mean issues such as how we handle politics on HN, when we turn off flags, etc.) and have spent countless hours answering people's questions in the threads as well as by email. I wouldn't do those things if I "could not care less"—it's a ton of work, plus it's mind-numbingly repetitive!

(If you haven't seen any of those many explanations, I could understand why you might jump to such a conclusion, but it's based on a mistaken premise—probably due to the "measure zero" effect that I've described a few times [1].)

Here are a few links in case anyone hasn't seen those posts and needs some trailheads into the forest:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43212835 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 (Feb 2025)

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[1] The "measure zero effect" is the strange phenomenon that no matter how many times we repeat something, the set of users who hear (or at any rate remember) it seems to have measure zero. I also call this the statelessness of the internet, but I like the 'measure zero' analogy better because it includes the fact that many users do hear these things—they're just negligible in number, compared to the ones who don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923707 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25787443 (Jan 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380376 (Sept 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22741427 (March 2020)

@reseasonable commented:

"A dedicated hacker news of politics site is long overdue. Civil discussions, amazing moderation, and the intelligent insight of experts to hash out complex issues. I’d be on it and participating nearly all day long."

Any thoughts on this?

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43375462

Many years ago, I created a section of a site making the history of each commenter a major part of the discussion. This meant the trick of attempting a cleverly-structured and seemingly reasonable statement could more easily be revealed as a bad faith effort to promote hidden motives. It didn't tamp down moderation needs as much as it made the discussion far more useful for getting at how facts were related to how the discussion was being framed.

We required users to declare either neutrality or allegiance to one side of position on major issues and sub-issues. This forced users (in a limited way) to choose between spending time on honest, good-faith arguments for what they declared allegiance to, or be a "spy for the other side" and pursue dishonest, bad-faith arguments.

If a discussion site were structured to potentiate advanced moderation, you would be one of the world's premier experts in how to measure success, and in predicting the likelihood of success of different approaches. Somewhere, we need to be able to take the next step past sites like TheMotte.org

> Any thoughts on this?

I think it would be a very different site than HN, and much harder to moderate. Moderating HN pushes me to my limit, so I can't imagine what it would take to run such a site. That doesn't mean it can't be done, of course, and I'd be interested if someone could pull it off! But it would probably take a special person to do it—for most of us, the pressure would be too high.

Moderating HN pushes me to my limit

dang thank you for all the hard work you do to moderate this site. But I have to ask…do you ever take time off or go on vacations? You almost seem like an inhuman machine that works a lot (I mean this in a positive way btw lol)

Seriously man you do a great job taking care of this place. Please don’t forget to take care of yourself too.

With my own moderating experience, I would agree. The system would need to be based around moderation, not just posting and commenting.

It just seems that one of the most valuable uses of the internet could be in the area of politics, and with the high value, the high difficulty is worth tackling.

There have been some attempts to try to have places with high level rational political discussion.

The Neutral Politics subreddit is one example of such a place. I do not go to Reddit anymore because I feel the website overall is too addictive so I can't speak to the current quality of that specific subreddit but it was quite good several years ago and might offer you a little bit of what you want.

https://old.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/

It sounds like you have an impulse to try it—if you ever do, I hope you'll write about your experience and share it here!

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