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Shout out to dang! You're doing a great job! Thank you! Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. I

by Mizza 7y ago

Shout out to dang! You're doing a great job! Thank you! Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. I wish good moderation was a skill that more people learned - would you ever be interested in writing a guide or teaching a class on moderation?

TelmoMenezes 7y ago
> Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. Don't you find it a bit suspicious that the forum you happen to like is "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet"?
- Mizza 7y ago
  I don't know what you mean by "suspicious." I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts. The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    You might like Tildes. Here's their blog and docs which describe what Tildes is about. https://blog.tildes.net/ https://blog.tildes.net/ https://docs.tildes.net/ https://docs.tildes.net/ You may also like Lobste.rs https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/
    - ckris 7y ago
      Tildes is a bit ironic. Overall it is a lot better. The topics, timeline, moderation, structure and even comments. And a think some people might enjoy that. But it also sort of highlights the greater problem which is that most people who frequent these forums these days just aren't that interesting, or interested. Or it is at least hard for those who are to show that and get something out of it.
  - TelmoMenezes 7y ago
    > I don't know what you mean by "suspicious." I mean that, maybe you should distrust your own judgement that "HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". Perhaps other places have environments that you don't like but other people feel that they are "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". > I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts. In my experience this has a lot more to do with algorithmic instead of chronological ordering. Facebook for example, where a lot of communities have gone to die, is a context-destroying engine. Only memes and shitposts can survive. What is the point of writing something thoughtful if you don't know if anyone will even see it? Otherwise, online communities have a lifetime. Before HN there was Slashdot and Kuro5hin. They were nice at some point, then devolved into shit. Same thing will happen to HN and everything else, of course. > The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all. My favorite community uses a completely different strategy: there are no moderators but it is relatively obscure. Shit posters come and go, nobody reacts, all is fine. It has been going on for more than two decades. I will not disclose it because I do not want to ruin it, but I bet lots of things like this exist. They don't make money nor are they advertising arms of money-making operations, so nobody really cares. No newspaper will ever write an editorial about them -- this is why they are so great!
    - Reddit2 7y ago
      Reddit is actually pretty great. It's easy enough to evade the more-less-desireable parts of it. I can assure you some of the best textually-based content the last X years have happened there.
      - TelmoMenezes 7y ago
        I agree. Unfortunately, I have the impression it is already going in the downwards trajectory. The new redesign contains all the red flags. When "old.reddit.com" stops working, I suspect it's over for me.
  - intuitionist 7y ago
    Plenty of folks consider HN to have devolved into complete and utter dogshit; there aren’t many memes but there is a pretty heavy whiff of the Californian ideology, and given the choice I’ll usually take the memes.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Who likes a forum they find unreasonable? That's hardly "suspicious", it's a statement about taste.
amrrs 7y ago
Is it just Strict moderation or Members with a common goal of making this place a good / fair place?
- Mizza 7y ago
  I think both combine to form a culture. (In your HN settings, you'll see there's the ability to see deleted posts and shadowbanned users, and if you turn that on you'll see that most posts have a load a crazy people and trolls posting on them that the mods have cleaned up.)
- komali2 7y ago
  Bit of both. The moderation is necessary for keeping the community whole when we get influxes of trolls or redditors.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  Definitely the members IMO; a moderator can snipe out the occasional troll, but if all members are being pricks there's nothing that can be done about that. What you need is to maintain an atmosphere, a culture, etc. You need the community to call one another out and keep one another accountable. And you need to nip any broken windows in the bud - Reddit's comment threads often spiral out of control and into a spammy mess of memes and references for example, simply because that's part of their culture. It's harmless enough on Reddit, but if that happened on HN the comments section would diminish greatly in value.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Not the members. One of the other forums I frequent would be chock full of pricks by HN standards. They are known for being jerks on other forums that cover the same interest. It's still a very good community as long as you don't take everything personally.
- cmroanirgo 7y ago
  From the article, quoting @dang: ≥What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with individual users. That, case by case by case, seems to move the needle. But it’s very slow.” I think the guidelines are a great way of encouraging us all to be more thoughtful to others comments, and have noticed a difference in the way I might comment HN. Often I kill my comment before I actually click "Reply", especially if I know my comment will be too divisive, or if it doesn't add to the quality of previous comments. Sometimes I upvote a comment because it helped me question/ change a personal dogmatic view.
dmix 7y ago
I wouldn’t call it strict at all. He’s actually way more liberal about stuff than most over-bearing Reddit mods who think it’s their job to be editors of their own private newspaper rather than helping only when there’s no other option. This is why dang is so good at what he does as it draws a difficult balance.
- rubinelli 7y ago
  I'm of the opinion that it is best to err on the side of strictness. Once you make a reasonable exception, you open a precedent, and some people are very good at digging up and pointing out precedent.
  - beefhash 7y ago
    > and some people are very good at digging up and pointing out precedent. As one of the people who loves being that guy in another community: They're not only very good at digging up and pointing out precedents, they likely have systematic archives of everything that remotely relates to the decisions they wish to see made.
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      The guidelines of the site I think are the ultimate precedent. If Dang dont get ya the rest of the community likely will. HN is somewhat self-moderating after all. I have seen users point out to abuses of the community guidelines. I feel like sometimes users with negative Karma like crazy become even more obvious to mods. Sidenote: I still yearn to see what HN looks like to mods and what not. Not to cheat the system but to understand the system more (I love knowing these sorts of hidden details).
    - distant_hat 7y ago
      The mods should keep an archive of decisions that go the other way. This would keep a balance.
      - yorwba 7y ago
ekianjo 7y ago
> Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet Not at all. It's rather the community that makes it a reasonable discussion space. Most people here understand that this is not Reddit and that proper answers are needed when you interact with other members. Of course moderation is useful and necessary in certain cases, but it's certainly far from being the key factor here.
- abacadaba 7y ago
  Without the moderation the trolls take over, and then it doesn't matter what most people here understand.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    I highly doubt "2 moderators" would be able to do anything if half of the community was composed of trolls. The fact that trolls are very few in the first place, and not welcome by other members who flag them and downvote them to hell, make it possible for it to work even with a low level of moderation.
    - duxup 7y ago
      Making trolling less visible / viable practice is the work of moderators. Enough HN members are happy to feed the trolls (even if unwittingly) and encourage more without removing them.
      - ekianjo 7y ago
        > Making trolling less visible / viable practice is the work of moderators. Downvoting, flagging works even when the mods are not around. I am pretty sure that a comment flagged too many times is greyed out and almost invisible (and that happens without mods). Again, if we are to believe there are only 2 full time moderators on HN for the amount of comments going every single minute, it's virtually impossible to rely on mods alone for proper discussions: simple maths.
    - 7y ago
charlesism 7y ago
I've been waiting for an excuse to compliment the mods here, without it being off-topic. They do a great job! Of course, it also helps that the community here is more reasonable than most.
skrebbel 7y ago
This. I've been put in the corner by dang more than once, and I like to think that it made me a more considerate commenter-on-the-internet. Maybe even a more considerate person. Thanks! Also, I think that it's pretty special that the vast majority of the comments on this article is people disagreeing about what HN's prevalent opinion is. It's easy to have all kinds of opinions when you don't moderate (eg 8chan), but it's hard to moderate a forum and at the same time not let it become a monoculture. I've seen comments claiming that HN is a neoliberal / libertarian cesspool, and I've seen comments claiming that anything mildly non-PC gets downvoted into oblivion. If both the far left and the far right feel like HN represents the "other side's" opinion, then maybe there's a pretty decent middle ground being struck.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  > I've been put in the corner by dang Same. Thanks, dang. I deeply appreciate your work here.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
sokoloff 7y ago
I don't see the moderation here as particularly strict nor as the original source of all the goodness. I think having the right set of rules for the site's discussion (maintaining of which is a moderator job) and having a generally "good" population as an initial condition were the keys to setting the mods up for success. The mods' job then becomes to maintain the community's high level of discourse. I see a lot of comments which violate the site guidelines in a fairly minor way. To me, strict moderation would involve curtailing those (to the site's detriment in general, a la Reddit, Wikipedia, or stackoverflow). Instead, I think we have strict guidelines and fairly tolerant moderation thereof. (I also find it interesting and telling that I felt normal to say "we have" in the previous sentence, rather than "news.yc has".) PS: This is not meant to take anything away from what the mods do. It's critically important and they do a good job from my viewpoint. I think I got my hand slapped once in a decade (and I don't even now recall what it was, but I do recall that I agreed that I deserved it and it was handled reasonably).
User23 7y ago
I strongly agree. Although, to quibble, I think calling it strict moderation is selling it short. In addition to having coherent standards, dang is thoughtful, fair, and tolerant. I say this having been on the wrong end of quite a few warnings. If this forum is ruled with an iron fist, it sure has a thick layer of velvet around it. All moderation is subjective, but dang does a great job of staying intellectually honest and true to the site's mission. I very much get the old school hacker vibe. Thanks dang for doing a great job.
MarcScott 7y ago
I've been here since 2013 and I noticed a massive improvement in the submitted articles and comments once dang became a moderator. Thank you dang and sctb.
danng 7y ago
thanks

by Mizza 7y ago

TelmoMenezes 7y ago

> Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. Don't you find it a bit suspicious that the forum you happen to like is "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet"?

Mizza 7y ago
I don't know what you mean by "suspicious." I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts. The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all.
- DanBC 7y ago
  You might like Tildes. Here's their blog and docs which describe what Tildes is about. https://blog.tildes.net/ https://blog.tildes.net/ https://docs.tildes.net/ https://docs.tildes.net/ You may also like Lobste.rs https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/
  - ckris 7y ago
    Tildes is a bit ironic. Overall it is a lot better. The topics, timeline, moderation, structure and even comments. And a think some people might enjoy that. But it also sort of highlights the greater problem which is that most people who frequent these forums these days just aren't that interesting, or interested. Or it is at least hard for those who are to show that and get something out of it.
- TelmoMenezes 7y ago
  > I don't know what you mean by "suspicious." I mean that, maybe you should distrust your own judgement that "HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". Perhaps other places have environments that you don't like but other people feel that they are "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". > I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts. In my experience this has a lot more to do with algorithmic instead of chronological ordering. Facebook for example, where a lot of communities have gone to die, is a context-destroying engine. Only memes and shitposts can survive. What is the point of writing something thoughtful if you don't know if anyone will even see it? Otherwise, online communities have a lifetime. Before HN there was Slashdot and Kuro5hin. They were nice at some point, then devolved into shit. Same thing will happen to HN and everything else, of course. > The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all. My favorite community uses a completely different strategy: there are no moderators but it is relatively obscure. Shit posters come and go, nobody reacts, all is fine. It has been going on for more than two decades. I will not disclose it because I do not want to ruin it, but I bet lots of things like this exist. They don't make money nor are they advertising arms of money-making operations, so nobody really cares. No newspaper will ever write an editorial about them -- this is why they are so great!
  - Reddit2 7y ago
    Reddit is actually pretty great. It's easy enough to evade the more-less-desireable parts of it. I can assure you some of the best textually-based content the last X years have happened there.
    - TelmoMenezes 7y ago
      I agree. Unfortunately, I have the impression it is already going in the downwards trajectory. The new redesign contains all the red flags. When "old.reddit.com" stops working, I suspect it's over for me.
- intuitionist 7y ago
  Plenty of folks consider HN to have devolved into complete and utter dogshit; there aren’t many memes but there is a pretty heavy whiff of the Californian ideology, and given the choice I’ll usually take the memes.
pjc50 7y ago
Who likes a forum they find unreasonable? That's hardly "suspicious", it's a statement about taste.

amrrs 7y ago

Is it just Strict moderation or Members with a common goal of making this place a good / fair place?

Mizza 7y ago
I think both combine to form a culture. (In your HN settings, you'll see there's the ability to see deleted posts and shadowbanned users, and if you turn that on you'll see that most posts have a load a crazy people and trolls posting on them that the mods have cleaned up.)
komali2 7y ago
Bit of both. The moderation is necessary for keeping the community whole when we get influxes of trolls or redditors.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
Definitely the members IMO; a moderator can snipe out the occasional troll, but if all members are being pricks there's nothing that can be done about that. What you need is to maintain an atmosphere, a culture, etc. You need the community to call one another out and keep one another accountable. And you need to nip any broken windows in the bud - Reddit's comment threads often spiral out of control and into a spammy mess of memes and references for example, simply because that's part of their culture. It's harmless enough on Reddit, but if that happened on HN the comments section would diminish greatly in value.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Not the members. One of the other forums I frequent would be chock full of pricks by HN standards. They are known for being jerks on other forums that cover the same interest. It's still a very good community as long as you don't take everything personally.
cmroanirgo 7y ago
From the article, quoting @dang: ≥What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with individual users. That, case by case by case, seems to move the needle. But it’s very slow.” I think the guidelines are a great way of encouraging us all to be more thoughtful to others comments, and have noticed a difference in the way I might comment HN. Often I kill my comment before I actually click "Reply", especially if I know my comment will be too divisive, or if it doesn't add to the quality of previous comments. Sometimes I upvote a comment because it helped me question/ change a personal dogmatic view.

dmix 7y ago

I wouldn’t call it strict at all. He’s actually way more liberal about stuff than most over-bearing Reddit mods who think it’s their job to be editors of their own private newspaper rather than helping only when there’s no other option. This is why dang is so good at what he does as it draws a difficult balance.

rubinelli 7y ago
I'm of the opinion that it is best to err on the side of strictness. Once you make a reasonable exception, you open a precedent, and some people are very good at digging up and pointing out precedent.
- beefhash 7y ago
  > and some people are very good at digging up and pointing out precedent. As one of the people who loves being that guy in another community: They're not only very good at digging up and pointing out precedents, they likely have systematic archives of everything that remotely relates to the decisions they wish to see made.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    The guidelines of the site I think are the ultimate precedent. If Dang dont get ya the rest of the community likely will. HN is somewhat self-moderating after all. I have seen users point out to abuses of the community guidelines. I feel like sometimes users with negative Karma like crazy become even more obvious to mods. Sidenote: I still yearn to see what HN looks like to mods and what not. Not to cheat the system but to understand the system more (I love knowing these sorts of hidden details).
  - distant_hat 7y ago
    The mods should keep an archive of decisions that go the other way. This would keep a balance.
    - yorwba 7y ago

ekianjo 7y ago

> Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet Not at all. It's rather the community that makes it a reasonable discussion space. Most people here understand that this is not Reddit and that proper answers are needed when you interact with other members. Of course moderation is useful and necessary in certain cases, but it's certainly far from being the key factor here.

abacadaba 7y ago
Without the moderation the trolls take over, and then it doesn't matter what most people here understand.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  I highly doubt "2 moderators" would be able to do anything if half of the community was composed of trolls. The fact that trolls are very few in the first place, and not welcome by other members who flag them and downvote them to hell, make it possible for it to work even with a low level of moderation.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Making trolling less visible / viable practice is the work of moderators. Enough HN members are happy to feed the trolls (even if unwittingly) and encourage more without removing them.
    - ekianjo 7y ago
      > Making trolling less visible / viable practice is the work of moderators. Downvoting, flagging works even when the mods are not around. I am pretty sure that a comment flagged too many times is greyed out and almost invisible (and that happens without mods). Again, if we are to believe there are only 2 full time moderators on HN for the amount of comments going every single minute, it's virtually impossible to rely on mods alone for proper discussions: simple maths.
  - 7y ago

charlesism 7y ago

I've been waiting for an excuse to compliment the mods here, without it being off-topic. They do a great job! Of course, it also helps that the community here is more reasonable than most.

skrebbel 7y ago

This. I've been put in the corner by dang more than once, and I like to think that it made me a more considerate commenter-on-the-internet. Maybe even a more considerate person. Thanks! Also, I think that it's pretty special that the vast majority of the comments on this article is people disagreeing about what HN's prevalent opinion is. It's easy to have all kinds of opinions when you don't moderate (eg 8chan), but it's hard to moderate a forum and at the same time not let it become a monoculture. I've seen comments claiming that HN is a neoliberal / libertarian cesspool, and I've seen comments claiming that anything mildly non-PC gets downvoted into oblivion. If both the far left and the far right feel like HN represents the "other side's" opinion, then maybe there's a pretty decent middle ground being struck.

toasterlovin 7y ago
> I've been put in the corner by dang Same. Thanks, dang. I deeply appreciate your work here.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

sokoloff 7y ago

I don't see the moderation here as particularly strict nor as the original source of all the goodness. I think having the right set of rules for the site's discussion (maintaining of which is a moderator job) and having a generally "good" population as an initial condition were the keys to setting the mods up for success. The mods' job then becomes to maintain the community's high level of discourse. I see a lot of comments which violate the site guidelines in a fairly minor way. To me, strict moderation would involve curtailing those (to the site's detriment in general, a la Reddit, Wikipedia, or stackoverflow). Instead, I think we have strict guidelines and fairly tolerant moderation thereof. (I also find it interesting and telling that I felt normal to say "we have" in the previous sentence, rather than "news.yc has".) PS: This is not meant to take anything away from what the mods do. It's critically important and they do a good job from my viewpoint. I think I got my hand slapped once in a decade (and I don't even now recall what it was, but I do recall that I agreed that I deserved it and it was handled reasonably).

User23 7y ago

I strongly agree. Although, to quibble, I think calling it strict moderation is selling it short. In addition to having coherent standards, dang is thoughtful, fair, and tolerant. I say this having been on the wrong end of quite a few warnings. If this forum is ruled with an iron fist, it sure has a thick layer of velvet around it. All moderation is subjective, but dang does a great job of staying intellectually honest and true to the site's mission. I very much get the old school hacker vibe. Thanks dang for doing a great job.

MarcScott 7y ago

I've been here since 2013 and I noticed a massive improvement in the submitted articles and comments once dang became a moderator. Thank you dang and sctb.

danng 7y ago

thanks