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Comment by zfg | Hacker News Reader

Nah, he's become a cynic. dang thinks Hacker News is a "swamp of amnesia". It's not a great attitude.

For those curious about the source: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43097876>

Looks like he's just talking about how users that start flame wars around the contentious topic of the day will forget about it soon and move on to the next topic. Even if you disagree with him in regards to the topic that was posted on, I don't see how anyone can honestly misinterpret that badly enough to think he's describing HN as a whole.

The "amnesia problem" needs active effort to counteract. Without longitudinal story-telling like you would get in a well-maintained wiki or book, it's inevitable eventually...

I think it's become a huge society-scale problem caused by information overload, and I don't see it improving any time soon.

That reflects well on his communication skills; 'Swamp of Amnesia' is a less hackneyed phrase than 'Eternal September'

No, he thinks things don't matter because no one will remember them. He's wrong.

Dan's moderation practices are viewable via his comment history*. They align well with my preferences, but, with a little imagination, I can see how some people wouldn't like them. One person's idea of good moderation is another person's terrible moderation.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

You're not seeing everything he does. For example, he removes capabilities from people's accounts and he can't remember why he did it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42917749

He says he likes things to be "informal" by which he really means "opaque".

By informal I do not mean opaque. What I mean is that anyone is welcome to ask questions about HN and we're happy to answer them.

What we don't do is try to answer all the questions in advance. That's for several reasons, the first of which is that it's impossible.

But you're not willing to be upfront by including that information on the user's account.

That's opaque.

No, that's formal. Formal systems that purport to answer all questions in advance are a bureaucratic bane, and as long as I'm in charge of HN, we won't go there. I'm confident that the community feels the same way.

If there's any information that someone wants to find out about HN or HN moderation, all they need to do is ask us.

Dude, you're leaving people guessing. That's no good. That is not nice "informality".

I don't think it's a good idea to complain publicly about the moderation regime here. To me it seems dang and whoever else has thought things through and made reasonable decisions based on, among other considerations, the amount of labour they have at their disposal. Changing that would likely require a very strong incentive, and chatter does not amount to one.

What, I shouldn't publicly comment on the regime?

Why? Will dang send his goons after me?

I don't like tone policing in general, but be nice to dang. He has earned that courtesy, at least.

Everyone is always guessing about everything. I try not to combat too many universals.

No, you're just evading responsibility which, unfortunately, is typical of the tech sector these days.

Maybe you can talk a little bit about how your ideal HN would work, or look like or be moderated like? What sort of stories and comments would it have? How would it be different from the current one? It's hard to tell what you're actually arguing for given that most of your output seems to be directed at some windmill of your own construction.

As I've said, if the capabilities of a user's account are deliberately reduced then report that to the user on their account page. That's being upfront as opposed to being secretive and squirrelly and dodging responsibility.

Ok but the limitations of this have also been explained many times and it's not like the way it works here is unique to HN, that's how almost all forums work. lobste.rs is an attempt to do things somewhat differently and it doesn't feel like much of an improvement.

There are no limitations to simply being upfront and Hacker News can aspire to be better. It doesn't matter how other forums work.

You have to convince other people that this is 'better' and it matters a lot that statistically nobody else believes it's better. It must have crossed your mind at some point that simply repeating 'my way is better' over and over is, at a minimum, not very persuasive.

I don't have to convince other people. dang says, "as long as I'm in charge of HN, we won't go there".

dang is simply repeating "my way is better".

No, I'm sorry, this is plainly wrong. This isn't a dialogue between you and dang where you're having some difference of subjective opinion. You aren't debating whether pineapple on pizza is good or not. HN has been around for ages and in that particular aspect it works pretty much (or more transparently) the way just about every internet forum works. If dang and others are repeating something it's in response to you. You have to make some sort of case for your position being better - your position (which you've barely articulated to any degree of detail) is not somehow equivalent to the prevalent implementation because it doesn't have a prevalent implementation. The onus is on you to make the case for it. Like, that's how discourse (and the effecting of any kind of change, presumably) actually works.

You don't think transparency is better? Let's try it and see the result.

Will dang try it?

You (both zfg and any HN member reading this) can email the mods if you've got questions about how the site's treating you.

I don't believe I've ever had sanctions put on my account here (though dang did admonish me, once, among numerous other interactions). But I've had my IP address caught up in bans (I often read HN without logging in), and a few other things.

That is: if you want to know what's happening to your account, you can fall back on the slightly-higher-friction option of asking what's happening. No, it's not there automatically in your account profile, but then, that solution would permit for an attacker to automatically detect (and presumably counter) such information. The soft / opaque / translucent failure mode of HN actually works reasonably well in that context and environment.

NB: I'm in general agreement with many of your concerns about HN, and in particular how it fits and how it is behaving in a rapidly-changing political environment in which HN and YC have a considerable role. But not everything you're proposing bears out, and even some of what does (e.g., opaque limitations on accounts) doesn't work well in a larger context. I do have strong concerns about how HN's comments guidance hits unevenly in political discussion especially. I'm not entirely sure how to best improve on that, though I've been thinking through options and doing some reading (Jurgen Habermass's work in particular).

I've spent about 15 years studying HN (and often being wrong about it). If you'd (again, zfg or others) care to discuss via email my contact info is on my account page.

HN is a very particular public digital garden and @dang is a gardener doing his gardening stuff, just wondering what is your purpose here if you don't mind sharing?

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