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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

I guess this is the one place I have to actually voice my complaint.

The entire thread is full of sneering and snark — dark allusions to fascism; unfounded (by logical necessity) allegations about the true motivations of people involved; and attempts to tie together all sorts of ideological enemies into a single outgroup, roughly labelled "Republicans". It is absolutely waging ideological warfare and it only seems to pass muster because it goes along with the community consensus rather than against it.

This has been happening on seemingly every vaguely politically-relevant, popular post for months. It didn't seem to be happening when I joined the site, months before the election. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ... seems like relevant reading here. With a note that this is from the previous cycle, and nobody has apparently learned a damned thing.

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I hear you. The problem is it's just the way the world is at the moment, and HN is part of the world.

We don't like the kinds of things that are posted in these threads, and we try to minimize how much day-to-day political rage fodder gets front page space. At the same time, we have to recognize that these are issues that people care a lot about, and if people find that HN is a better place to have these discussions than elsewhere, then maybe we're offering something worthwhile by having these discussions here when they're about major developments.

But the guidelines still apply and if people are attacking others and engaging in political/ideological battle, you can help us by flagging comments or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com to let us know about the worst stuff you see.

We certainly wouldn't want HN to be like this forever (it's no fun to moderate, that's for sure). We'll keep doing what we can to move things in the right direction.

> We certainly wouldn't want HN to be like this forever (it's no fun to moderate, that's for sure). We'll keep doing what we can to move things in the right direction.

Isn’t the work of manual moderation largely no fun to begin with, when the rubber meets the road and you need to formulate a novel response, I mean?

I don’t mean to minimize your role here, as all the mods are awesome, and I can’t speak for others out of respect, but I can be trying and have definitely made more work for you all at times.

But all that said, what do the mods do here? What does moderation of HN look like on a good day? What makes the job fun in the first place? Can we build in more fun for users and mods? (Meta-moderation and its points system on Slashdot were peak internet message board user voting and moderation for me, I’ll admit. But Slashdot isn’t Slashdot anymore either.)

I guess I’m trying to understand what you can do and are doing to move things in the right direction, and what that means for HN, and more importantly, how we all can make HN more fun for all involved, hopefully even mods.

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