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Don't take a drop of advice from Teresa Nielsen Hayden -- it's all either blatantly obvious or outrageously poisonous. She is absolutely the least-moderate mode
by blasdel 17y ago
Don't take a drop of advice from Teresa Nielsen Hayden -- it's all either blatantly obvious or outrageously poisonous. She is absolutely the least-moderate moderator on the entire English-language internet, and has proven herself adept at training subordinates to follow in her footsteps.
pg is already more than capricious enough already, I shudder to think of how ridiculous things would get around here if he started taking lessons from the dark master.
- blasdel 17y agoA nice example would be this enormous thread (2mb of HTML), that drags on documenting the incendiary results of her 'moderation' on BoingBoing. Search for "TNH": http://www.metafilter.com/72928/Boing-Boing-Finds-21st-Century-Trotsky http://www.metafilter.com/72928/Boing-Boing-Finds-21st-Centu... A choice summary quote: "i would never never ever hire tnh as a mod ever -- an inquisitor, maybe, a chief of secret police, certainly, but a mod, no!"
- jrockway 17y agoMetafilter also deletes too many comments.
- blasdel 17y agoYou'd be surprised how little comment deletion there is outside of Ask Metafilter (where all comments have to answer the damn question). Pretty much the only comments deleted from the main site are personal attacks. There's an active backchannel for discussing such things where almost nothing is deleted. They take great pains to avoid banning people (excepting spammers, who get their signup fee refunded!), though sometimes they dole out timeouts. The community policing means that the shitty users tend to disable their own accounts. pg takes the opposite approach, applying a single assholish technical approach to all problems: hellbanning for everyone!
- jrockway 17y agoFWIW, I only read AskMe. But I agree that Metafilter handles moderation better than HN. The way voting is here, it seems like it mostly depends on the time of day as to whether a comment of mine gets -4 or +30. (Usually this works out for me pretty well... but I can't help feeling dirty when I write something that gets upmodded that high.)
- chrischen 17y agoWell I also feel like a system which allows mob punishment tends to select "regulars" who are more homogenous in opinions, since they will fit into the thinking which defines the community. But if you want a like-minded small community it's a tradeoff that's necessary. Why do you feel dirty though?
- jey 17y agoYeah... e.g. this poor guy, who got "auto-hellbanned" and has been talking to himself because the third comment he ever made was childish: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=efaith http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=efaith
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- cstross 17y agoIf you want to run any kind of community on the web these days, you need a chief of secret police. "Benign dictatorship" works. Anything short of it is asking to be rules-lawyered to death by trolls and griefers.