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Comment by donnachangstein | Hacker News Reader

The genius of Slashdot's moderation system is that it forced you to be fastidious with how your limited mod points were allocated, only using them on posts that really deserved them.

As opposed to tearing through a thread and downvoting any and everything you disagree with.

Slashdot encouraged more positive moderation, unless you were obviously trolling.

The meta-moderators kept any moderation abuse in check.

It's sad to see we have devolved from this model, and conversations have become far more toxic and polarized as a direct result of it. (Dissenting opinions are quickly hidden, and those that reinforce existing norms bubble to the top.)

I believe HN papers over these problems by relying on a lot of manual hand-moderation and curation which sounds very labor intensive, whereas Slashdot was deliberately hands-off and left the power to the people.

View on HN

I miss slashdot when it was at its peak decades back

unsure why precisely it descended so much

not crazy about HN's approach but the quality of the discourse here is so high through whatever mechanism, I don't much care

I remember slashdot being full of "M$ is teh evill111!!" and other childish nonsense. At the end of the day what matters is the results, and i much prefer the discusions on hn than /.

For HN, replace M$ with Musk and you'll still see parallels. Although to be fair HN is much more even-keeled than most commenting systems, like Ars and Electrek.

Slashdot is struggling a bit these days. The lower the comment count, the worse the moderation, so it's a bit of a snowball effect. The UI could use some help; there are many who don't want it to change at all, but it would be nice if an alternate UI were available, hitting the same API.

> For HN, replace M$ with Musk and you'll still see parallels.

I think HN leans towards deriding both MS and Musk (see any thread on MS and FOSS). In any case, I think that part of being well-spoken is that you speak out against severely bad actors often. It's never useful to reflexively criticize something, but people may contemplate and still decide they're right. Making a comment is the bare minimum of accountability for bad actors who should know better. It may not be to your taste that HN is such a platform, but that's not up to your decision any more than it is mine. There are many problems from a society that struggles to speak well or ill as a subject deserves, which is to say to speak the truth when it should be spoken, and not to speak mistruths except in exceptional circumstances. It would surely be best if one reasoned critique solved the problem and we never would hear of it again, but alas.

I use comments as a barometer for general sentiment, and what I'm seeing is that it's much more popular to repeat aggressive condemnatory statements than it is to analyze and provide counterpoints. This is not a surprise but I expect better of HN (and on most topics, HN provides this).

I don't expect HN commenters to change their minds necessarily, but I do wish they would elevate posts with more consideration and objectivity, and less low-effort outrage.

Certainly, but sometimes I'm just in the mood for "I'll take what I can get". Probably not the best position, but I haven't found it effective to try to change everyone's minds all the time.

> For HN, replace M$ with Musk and you'll still see parallels. Although to be fair HN is much more even-keeled than most commenting systems, like Ars and Electrek.

I don't really see it. /. had this basically every single thread and the criticism was very not substantive. Musk is unpopular here, but the criticism at least has a bit more meat to it and is not on every single post.

HN is the same with Big Tech and ads.

On HN Meta is one step away from going bankrupt and being sued into oblivion. Meta’s Earnings Reports tell a very different story.

I feel like HN fits the same shape in tech as Slashdot did and I’m not happy about it.

How are you determining the causative relationship?

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