4 ms·

In essence it’s the difference between what’s done here on HN, and the travesty that is Twitter.

myWindoonn 8y ago
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that HN is good. All societies are biased in various ways, and there are plenty of bigotries and stupidities uttered here on a daily basis. What you are doing is drawing an us-vs-them distinction. It's not healthy for discourse.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  HN is objectively better at content moderation than Twitter is. Not perfect, but better.
  - myWindoonn 8y ago
    "Objectively?" Could you please define your metric and then carry out a measurement, hopefully in a preregistered and reproducible manner? If not, why so confident? Because your tribe, the HN tribe, is objectively better than the Twitter tribe?
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      HN has guidelines, which are explicitly stated. Twitter (I gather) has guidelines or standards. So you measure content moderation by the number of posts that break the guidelines that are not moderated out.
      - myWindoonn 8y ago
        Your metric is not scale-invariant. It is trivially gamed by malicious actors. It does not reward higher-quality discourse. It rewards overzealous moderators. It rewards edgy or controversial discourse which does not break the guidelines. It rewards users who contribute a bare minimum of information while punishing users who write longer, more informative or interesting posts. Worst, by what objective measuring device can a post be compared to the guidelines? There are many extremely-subjective suggestions in HN's guidelines alone: * "Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face." * "Assume good faith." * "Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say." (Wanna give us a list of flamewar topics, mods?) * "Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle." As I write this, there is an ideological battle between JS frameworks on the front page. * "On HN, users should have an identity that others can relate to." Could you write a script that measures whether an HN post breaks the guidelines?
        AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        > It is trivially gamed by malicious actors. It does not reward higher-quality discourse. It rewards overzealous moderators. It rewards edgy or controversial discourse which does not break the guidelines. It rewards users who contribute a bare minimum of information while punishing users who write longer, more informative or interesting posts. To the best of my ability to determine, every single thing you said in this paragraph is false. Could you explain how you think some of that works? Because, quite frankly, your comments here look like you just want to complain about HN. > Could you write a script that measures whether an HN post breaks the guidelines? No. I could evaluate a bunch of posts, though, and I suspect that my evaluation of that bunch of posts would not be statistically different from others' evaluation of them (assuming fairness and no malice on all the evaluators' part, of course). It's not automeable, and it's not perfect. But it's also not rocket science.
  - master-litty 8y ago
    I would argue that's truly subjective. What's the definition of good content moderation? Each platform has its purpose.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that HN is good. All societies are biased in various ways, and there are plenty of bigotries and stupidities uttered here on a daily basis. What you are doing is drawing an us-vs-them distinction. It's not healthy for discourse.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
HN is objectively better at content moderation than Twitter is. Not perfect, but better.
- myWindoonn 8y ago
  "Objectively?" Could you please define your metric and then carry out a measurement, hopefully in a preregistered and reproducible manner? If not, why so confident? Because your tribe, the HN tribe, is objectively better than the Twitter tribe?
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    HN has guidelines, which are explicitly stated. Twitter (I gather) has guidelines or standards. So you measure content moderation by the number of posts that break the guidelines that are not moderated out.
    - myWindoonn 8y ago
      Your metric is not scale-invariant. It is trivially gamed by malicious actors. It does not reward higher-quality discourse. It rewards overzealous moderators. It rewards edgy or controversial discourse which does not break the guidelines. It rewards users who contribute a bare minimum of information while punishing users who write longer, more informative or interesting posts. Worst, by what objective measuring device can a post be compared to the guidelines? There are many extremely-subjective suggestions in HN's guidelines alone: * "Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face." * "Assume good faith." * "Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say." (Wanna give us a list of flamewar topics, mods?) * "Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle." As I write this, there is an ideological battle between JS frameworks on the front page. * "On HN, users should have an identity that others can relate to." Could you write a script that measures whether an HN post breaks the guidelines?
      - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        > It is trivially gamed by malicious actors. It does not reward higher-quality discourse. It rewards overzealous moderators. It rewards edgy or controversial discourse which does not break the guidelines. It rewards users who contribute a bare minimum of information while punishing users who write longer, more informative or interesting posts. To the best of my ability to determine, every single thing you said in this paragraph is false. Could you explain how you think some of that works? Because, quite frankly, your comments here look like you just want to complain about HN. > Could you write a script that measures whether an HN post breaks the guidelines? No. I could evaluate a bunch of posts, though, and I suspect that my evaluation of that bunch of posts would not be statistically different from others' evaluation of them (assuming fairness and no malice on all the evaluators' part, of course). It's not automeable, and it's not perfect. But it's also not rocket science.
- master-litty 8y ago
  I would argue that's truly subjective. What's the definition of good content moderation? Each platform has its purpose.