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>Thanks to moderation, when I open news.ycombinator.com right now, I’m pleased to see interesting new posts about C, Chopin, and concurrency; and no new posts a

>Thanks to moderation, when I open news.ycombinator.com right now, I’m pleased to see interesting new posts about C, Chopin, and concurrency; and no new posts about fake news, anti-vaxxers, or Flat Earth. We only like strong moderation when it enforces our biases and political leanings.

PakG1 8y ago
While this is true, the anti-vaccine debate and the flat earth debate is verifiably settled and only continues because people refuse to accept it. Diversity of opinion is great for society, but if it gets in the way of verifiable AND verified fact, I'm not sure how diversity of opinion is helpful.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Simply not true. I like strong moderation even when it sometimes catches, as it has, topics that suit my biases and leanings. Just as with the more strongly moderated reddits, it's the price of achieving a decent factual discussion. Without it there's a predictable race to the bottom. Without it HN would be just another barely moderated reddit with little appeal.
YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
You can visit more than one site with news/links to satisfy your curiosity, and I'm sure many people here do. And even more importantly the guidelines are explicit here - you know well what you will not find on this site (example: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"). I think the trouble starts when people are tricked into believing that whatever they're seeing is a fair sample of the world while in reality it's not.
indigochill 8y ago
I disagree with "only". I've been a moderator on a couple of game forums, and my line with people who got too heavily into politics was, "We're here to talk about the game. I'm not here to judge political views, but discussing politics isn't the purpose of this forum. So please take that conversation somewhere more suited for it." My experience on HN has been much the same. There's a range of ideas here and some are more controversial than others, but they're pretty much always relevant to the interests of the community. I appreciate the relatively tight focus and that's what keeps HN feeling like a high signal-to-noise place to me.
- dooglius 8y ago
  I'm surprised this has been your experience, I've found that HN veers quite often into politics.
  - indigochill 8y ago
    I didn't say it didn't. Politics is often relevant to the HN discussion in ways it wasn't on my forums. Chinese manufacturing, Russian information campaigns, Israeli intelligence, US patent cases, etc.
kop316 8y ago
I think the comment was comparing HN to Reddit. It gets incredibly tiresome to browse /r/all and see several top posts about "look how dumb this anti-vaxxer/flat earther/MLM is", or see an article and wonder what people have to comment, and all the comments are some movie reference, low effort meme, etc.
jorgesborges 8y ago
That's the point of moderation: to enforce our shared bias and leanings so that we're more likely to see the content we want to see. Strong moderation may restrict the quantity and quality of discussions that lie outside our bias and leanings, but it protects us from being overwhelmed by them too. As a community our bias implicitly endorses C, Chopin, and concurrency as valid topics for discussion.

PakG1 8y ago

While this is true, the anti-vaccine debate and the flat earth debate is verifiably settled and only continues because people refuse to accept it. Diversity of opinion is great for society, but if it gets in the way of verifiable AND verified fact, I'm not sure how diversity of opinion is helpful.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

Simply not true. I like strong moderation even when it sometimes catches, as it has, topics that suit my biases and leanings. Just as with the more strongly moderated reddits, it's the price of achieving a decent factual discussion. Without it there's a predictable race to the bottom. Without it HN would be just another barely moderated reddit with little appeal.

YjSe2GMQ 8y ago

You can visit more than one site with news/links to satisfy your curiosity, and I'm sure many people here do. And even more importantly the guidelines are explicit here - you know well what you will not find on this site (example: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"). I think the trouble starts when people are tricked into believing that whatever they're seeing is a fair sample of the world while in reality it's not.

indigochill 8y ago

I disagree with "only". I've been a moderator on a couple of game forums, and my line with people who got too heavily into politics was, "We're here to talk about the game. I'm not here to judge political views, but discussing politics isn't the purpose of this forum. So please take that conversation somewhere more suited for it." My experience on HN has been much the same. There's a range of ideas here and some are more controversial than others, but they're pretty much always relevant to the interests of the community. I appreciate the relatively tight focus and that's what keeps HN feeling like a high signal-to-noise place to me.

dooglius 8y ago
I'm surprised this has been your experience, I've found that HN veers quite often into politics.
- indigochill 8y ago
  I didn't say it didn't. Politics is often relevant to the HN discussion in ways it wasn't on my forums. Chinese manufacturing, Russian information campaigns, Israeli intelligence, US patent cases, etc.

kop316 8y ago

I think the comment was comparing HN to Reddit. It gets incredibly tiresome to browse /r/all and see several top posts about "look how dumb this anti-vaxxer/flat earther/MLM is", or see an article and wonder what people have to comment, and all the comments are some movie reference, low effort meme, etc.

jorgesborges 8y ago

That's the point of moderation: to enforce our shared bias and leanings so that we're more likely to see the content we want to see. Strong moderation may restrict the quantity and quality of discussions that lie outside our bias and leanings, but it protects us from being overwhelmed by them too. As a community our bias implicitly endorses C, Chopin, and concurrency as valid topics for discussion.