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You'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 co
by blasdel 17y ago
You'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