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Even though HN is a community, the front page is essentially the mods' personal judgment. They are the editors, and HN is a newspaper. I like it this way. They
by sillysaurus3 9y ago
Even though HN is a community, the front page is essentially the mods' personal judgment. They are the editors, and HN is a newspaper.
I like it this way. They have excellent taste. The community has repeatedly proven it cannot be trusted to upvote intellectually gratifying content. pg's original HN code contained a flag for "rally", meaning the story is a rallying cry, and is therefore penalized because it's so easy to mindlessly upvote it.
The results speak for themselves: HN is now almost a top-1000 site by traffic.
They had to be phenomenal. I don't think many people appreciate just how difficult this was to pull off, or how much they work their asses off every single day. If they ignored HN for even a week, it would deteriorate noticeably.
Yet technology is at least as important. The fact that our upvotes do matter makes the situation unique -- although the mods can determine the relative weights of stories, we can still push a story upwards if enough of us are interested, and the story fits the site's original goal of gratifying intellectual curiosity.
There is no company anywhere in the world like this. At this point, HN practically defines our culture. When news stories say things like "so-and-so story about <technology> has been making the rounds on social media," at least some of them are talking about HN now. And your coworkers probably hear about the tech they use at least partly from HN.
The sole reason they're in this position is because they deserve to be. I hope they stay selective. As to being secretive, we should let them choose. If they want to reveal, fine. If not, fine. They've earned it. Even still, they've been remarkably transparent.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoHN's cool but it's just one forum among a million others. The moderation is good though sometimes arbitrary. That's a lot easier for users to accept when they know why they are getting positively/negatively moderated, which is a good reason for more openness. But at the end of the day it's a forum, the moderators have the final say, that's the contract you agree to in using it.
- tptacek 9y agoIf you don't like the way this site is edited, stand up an m1.large, hook Rails up to an sqlite database, and build your own. You'll be two generations of technology ahead of HN. The freedom to take other people's private belongings and repurpose them to your own ends is no real kind of freedom at all. But that's ultimately what you're yearning for when you allude to the Empire of Napoleon.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoI'm not complaining. HN is about the best of what we've got. My Napoleon reference was the slobbering nature of the comment, which is so pro-moderation as to lose objectivity.
- tptacek 9y agoSorry, it's probably the tenor of the whole thread I'm responding to, not you in particular.
- grzm 9y agoSomething I find frustrating in discussions like this is a tendency for expressions of gratitude or appreciation to often be dismissed as uncritical, as if the only meaningful act of criticism is that of finding faults or flaws. In such an environment it can be very difficult to express reasons why someone likes something or finds benefit in a way that others read as something other than fawning: particularly when you know that's how it's going to be read. There are reasons people continue to frequent HN as a news aggregator and comment on the site: it has some uses and benefits to them. 'sillysaurus3 does list a number of reasons supporting their position. If they're expressing a bit more joy and appreciation for your taste, dismissing that as "slobbering" seems quite harsh and unnecessary. Phrasing it as "pro-moderation" in an arguably pejorative manner likewise derails. A quality site, one I find personally valuable, requires moderation. If I'm in favor of a particular site and value its moderation efforts, I'm going to be "pro-moderation". If I actually find it valuable, enjoyable, and a benefit, I'm going to be appreciative, and maybe at times effusive. Have I lost objectivity in such a case? I'd like to think we're more human than that.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoYou're right. I edited the original to be kinder. Thanks.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoTry not to remove context like that. My reply looks quite strange now. :)
- sillysaurus3 9y agoIf Dan and Scott were kings, they would be fucking epic. Best monarchs ever. It's hard to think of anyone who cares more about fairness, but clever enough to decide for themselves. And they're usually right. I think I can count on one hand the number of mistakes they've made that even remotely mattered. And from a strategic standpoint, that number is effectively zero. There are probably a bunch of people behind the scenes, and they deserve lots of credit too. But there is something incredible about being able to post a dozen moderation comments every day for years without ever being so mistaken as to provoke community backlash. It would be really easy for them to offer an offhand opinion, or just make a bad call, and suddenly have people up in arms about it. They're also some of the most humble people. Both of them have done some really amazing work and have cool hobbies. But I've sort of had to pry that info out of them over years. http://github.com/gruseom/numen http://github.com/gruseom/numen - Dan's project. JS REPL for emacs. It took another four years for anyone to even come close (https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium) as far as I know. https://github.com/sctb/lumen https://github.com/sctb/lumen - Scott's project. A self-hosted Lisp that compiles and runs in both JS and Lua. The whole codebase recompiles in about one second flat when using LuaJIT. But like, that's maybe 5% of the cool stuff they've done. There's just no outward sign -- they don't bother with blog posts or any kind of self-promotion. So yes, all hail the kings of lisp.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoWas not aware of those projects or their backgrounds - thanks for those links.
- observation 9y agoI'd rate Dan and Scott highly as rulers, and I've been banned before. I have some qualms about some systematic things, but it's a broad philosophical dispute and not the running of HN. In governance - there is no way to 'win' anyway. I wish every leader had to be a forum moderator of very different groups of people, but we seem to select for whatever the opposite of that is no matter the political predilection.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago(FWIW, the parent edited their comment significantly. They made a comparison to Napoleon / kings. I didn't just say that out of nowhere.)