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There are two classes of users: normal people who want to use your service and people who actively weaponize it for their own ego. Those latter users have all t

There are two classes of users: normal people who want to use your service and people who actively weaponize it for their own ego. Those latter users have all the time in world and can defeat any attempt to stop them. This is because, online, time is the only resource that matters. You have a limited amount of this resource. Your company has a limited amount of this resource. Your normal users have a limited amount of this resource. There is a discussion below about Flat Earthers having every right to speak -- and I agree. And in fact, I doubt anyone would truly care about Flat Earthers having their Flat Earth forum or even adding an occasional Flat Earth comment whenever NASA posts a round Earth photo. That's never been the problem. The problem is that some users don't stop there -- they're on a mission to change the world. They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views. Most big platforms right now have a huge mess of people tossing free bytes at each other. If a small group of dedicated people wanted to ruin Hacker News for the rest of us, I have no doubt in my mind that they could. No amount of moderation could stop them. I've seen it first hand a few times with other services.

colechristensen 7y ago
The latter type who gain an outsized dopamine shot from whatever game your platform is tend to be what keeps your platform going and drives your revenue. It’s just that some of them you like. There’s a big drive to optimize your platform to those kinds of lowest common denominator users until it is ruined and worthless. Just A/B test maximize some metric to make sure it happens. You can fight back by intentionally disadvantaging the top percentiles of an important metric, finding out a few things that are the most common complaints with what you are and making maintenance of those core values, and limiting the amount of effort you put into being generally appealing.
pdonis 7y ago
> Most big platforms right now have a huge mess of people tossing free bytes at each other Which of course suggests the obvious solution of not letting the bytes be free any longer. Make users who want to post on your site pay for it.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  So only the people fanatical enough to pay gets to express their opinion and the regular people just don't bother?
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > So only the people fanatical enough to pay gets to express their opinion and the regular people just don't bother? Why do you think that only the fanatical people would pay?
    - msla 7y ago
      Because your content isn't that good. I say that with complete certainty. The vast majority of content is such crap I've never even heard of it, so I'm certainly not going to pay for it. Therefore, the only people who will pay for your content are a small group of fans (the fanatics) who both know you exist and are willing to do something about it. Calling it a drop in the bucket is grossly overestimating things.
      - pdonis 7y ago
        > Because your content isn't that good. If the content of the site isn't that good, why is it a problem if the site becomes unusable? And remember, we're not talking about my personal content. We're talking about sites like Twitter, or HN for that matter. If you don't think the content here on HN is that good, why are you here? Would you be ok with HN becoming unusable because it gets hijacked by people who don't care about adding value to the site but just want to push their personal agendas?
  - eitland 7y ago
    Make the bytes free, and the accounts cost resources. Resources can be: - time (come back tomorrow and next week to click this button and the account is yours) - effort (captcha like, or maybe even better some time at meta-moderation: Is this a good answer?) - monetary In any case, if accounts are no longer free then having an account in good standing will be worth something. Then, next time mods ban anyone it means there is a cost for them before they come back.
mattigames 7y ago
>They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views. Facebook and twitter _encourage_ people to abuse their platform, that's why you can write 100 tweets from one account on a single day and they don't try to stop you at all, they know all that content will show up in their statistics, it will also make other users reply to those comments and so on; so in the end they have all incentives to keep their platform filled with people enraged with each other. >If a small group of dedicated people wanted to ruin Hacker News for the rest of us, I have no doubt in my mind that they could. I'm not so sure, unlike Facebook HN is not a for-profit (Ycombinator is, Hacker news is not) so something as simple as only allowing comments from user accounts created before the attack started would mitigate the problem until a better solution is slowly deployed. Also, Facebook cannot ban an IP because other non-attacking users may be using that very same IP, a little site like HN loses nothing by banning offending IPs, a site like Facebook would get a gigantic backlash that would hurt the bottom line: Their valuation.
- olefoo 7y ago
  IP banning is not effective in an era of disposable VPNs and Tor. I mean you could try to keep up with Tor exit nodes and VPN gateways but pretty soon you'd be banning all of Azerbaijan or something.
  - carokann 7y ago
    Yeah and regardless of their efficiency, there are people who use dynamic IP. (not by choice)
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    Ip banning for new accounts together with creation time exceptions seems pretty good thought: almost all existing users would be unaffected. Only costs you growth untill you find some extras to put into the account creation process.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      Which "extras", though?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chr1 7y ago
They couldn't ruin HN because of the system of voting, flagging, and high karma requirement for downvoting. And this applies in general, the only working way to moderate is distributing the effort between users who are interested in the final result. Ideally big sites would not have one single system for moderation, but multiple lists so that if two groups keep flagging each other they get separated and don't see other groups posts, instead of one group having to leave the site.
- codesushi42 7y ago
  I don't know. HN has plenty of misinformation posted on it constantly. Countless posts that are objectively wrong, and in many cases it is done intentionally. I have seen lies supporting eugenics, lies about how quantum computing is a fake conspiracy, etc etc. And yet the mods only jump in when you're impolite by referring to OP with "you" and "you're" because it is a "personal attack". They are optimizing on the wrong problem, IMO. I would rather discuss with people who are snide rather than with liars who have an agenda. HN has its own "fake news" problems. And this is the society we are living in; you can say anything as long as it doesn't offend or hurt someone's feelings. Even if it is objectively fake horse shit.
  - chr1 7y ago
    In your example if someone pointed out that quantum computers required some equations to hold with far greater precision than anything measured, so there is small but non-zero probability that it will turn out quantum computers can not work, would it be a lie that moderators should delete? I believe it's not moderators job to decide what is a lie and what is not, if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it, that way you can convince people instead of trying to silence.
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      > I believe it's not moderators job to decide what is a lie and what is not codesushi42 didn't say it was. It said the system you describe still allows lies, myths, and misinformation to spread. The only mention of moderators was in the context of chastising the poster who calls the misinformation out. > if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it, that way you can convince people instead of trying to silence The tools you referred to are tools to silence, so you are "trying to silence" every time you flag or downvote a post. As for refuting the misinformation, I regularly see posts doing this downvoted while the misinformation is upvoted[1]. This is particularly true in discussions on contentious topics. Thus, I'm not nearly as certain as you are that these tools would protect HN from a sufficiently dedicated group. [1] At least once, because I downvote it and the comment remains black.
asabjorn 7y ago
At this point I think most people are concerned about hate speech policies. Normal opinions are censored through these rules, and the claims of harm are rather dubious. Why should companies be trusted to enforce elusive controls on our speech? And is it fair that tech companies act like editors and still get Section 230 liability protections as a tech platform that no editor gets? The end result of enforcing political correctness is preference falsification, which have lots of very negative effects. This is a good video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzjqjU2FOwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzjqjU2FOwA
loceng 7y ago
Add then into the mix bad actor nation states who want to cause rife in your society, to disrupt or destabilize your democracy, who pay people to weaponize your platforms.

colechristensen 7y ago

The latter type who gain an outsized dopamine shot from whatever game your platform is tend to be what keeps your platform going and drives your revenue. It’s just that some of them you like. There’s a big drive to optimize your platform to those kinds of lowest common denominator users until it is ruined and worthless. Just A/B test maximize some metric to make sure it happens. You can fight back by intentionally disadvantaging the top percentiles of an important metric, finding out a few things that are the most common complaints with what you are and making maintenance of those core values, and limiting the amount of effort you put into being generally appealing.

pdonis 7y ago

> Most big platforms right now have a huge mess of people tossing free bytes at each other Which of course suggests the obvious solution of not letting the bytes be free any longer. Make users who want to post on your site pay for it.

baroffoos 7y ago
So only the people fanatical enough to pay gets to express their opinion and the regular people just don't bother?
- pdonis 7y ago
  > So only the people fanatical enough to pay gets to express their opinion and the regular people just don't bother? Why do you think that only the fanatical people would pay?
  - msla 7y ago
    Because your content isn't that good. I say that with complete certainty. The vast majority of content is such crap I've never even heard of it, so I'm certainly not going to pay for it. Therefore, the only people who will pay for your content are a small group of fans (the fanatics) who both know you exist and are willing to do something about it. Calling it a drop in the bucket is grossly overestimating things.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > Because your content isn't that good. If the content of the site isn't that good, why is it a problem if the site becomes unusable? And remember, we're not talking about my personal content. We're talking about sites like Twitter, or HN for that matter. If you don't think the content here on HN is that good, why are you here? Would you be ok with HN becoming unusable because it gets hijacked by people who don't care about adding value to the site but just want to push their personal agendas?
- eitland 7y ago
  Make the bytes free, and the accounts cost resources. Resources can be: - time (come back tomorrow and next week to click this button and the account is yours) - effort (captcha like, or maybe even better some time at meta-moderation: Is this a good answer?) - monetary In any case, if accounts are no longer free then having an account in good standing will be worth something. Then, next time mods ban anyone it means there is a cost for them before they come back.

mattigames 7y ago

>They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views. Facebook and twitter _encourage_ people to abuse their platform, that's why you can write 100 tweets from one account on a single day and they don't try to stop you at all, they know all that content will show up in their statistics, it will also make other users reply to those comments and so on; so in the end they have all incentives to keep their platform filled with people enraged with each other. >If a small group of dedicated people wanted to ruin Hacker News for the rest of us, I have no doubt in my mind that they could. I'm not so sure, unlike Facebook HN is not a for-profit (Ycombinator is, Hacker news is not) so something as simple as only allowing comments from user accounts created before the attack started would mitigate the problem until a better solution is slowly deployed. Also, Facebook cannot ban an IP because other non-attacking users may be using that very same IP, a little site like HN loses nothing by banning offending IPs, a site like Facebook would get a gigantic backlash that would hurt the bottom line: Their valuation.

olefoo 7y ago
IP banning is not effective in an era of disposable VPNs and Tor. I mean you could try to keep up with Tor exit nodes and VPN gateways but pretty soon you'd be banning all of Azerbaijan or something.
- carokann 7y ago
  Yeah and regardless of their efficiency, there are people who use dynamic IP. (not by choice)
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  Ip banning for new accounts together with creation time exceptions seems pretty good thought: almost all existing users would be unaffected. Only costs you growth untill you find some extras to put into the account creation process.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Which "extras", though?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

chr1 7y ago

They couldn't ruin HN because of the system of voting, flagging, and high karma requirement for downvoting. And this applies in general, the only working way to moderate is distributing the effort between users who are interested in the final result. Ideally big sites would not have one single system for moderation, but multiple lists so that if two groups keep flagging each other they get separated and don't see other groups posts, instead of one group having to leave the site.

codesushi42 7y ago
I don't know. HN has plenty of misinformation posted on it constantly. Countless posts that are objectively wrong, and in many cases it is done intentionally. I have seen lies supporting eugenics, lies about how quantum computing is a fake conspiracy, etc etc. And yet the mods only jump in when you're impolite by referring to OP with "you" and "you're" because it is a "personal attack". They are optimizing on the wrong problem, IMO. I would rather discuss with people who are snide rather than with liars who have an agenda. HN has its own "fake news" problems. And this is the society we are living in; you can say anything as long as it doesn't offend or hurt someone's feelings. Even if it is objectively fake horse shit.
- chr1 7y ago
  In your example if someone pointed out that quantum computers required some equations to hold with far greater precision than anything measured, so there is small but non-zero probability that it will turn out quantum computers can not work, would it be a lie that moderators should delete? I believe it's not moderators job to decide what is a lie and what is not, if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it, that way you can convince people instead of trying to silence.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    > I believe it's not moderators job to decide what is a lie and what is not codesushi42 didn't say it was. It said the system you describe still allows lies, myths, and misinformation to spread. The only mention of moderators was in the context of chastising the poster who calls the misinformation out. > if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it, that way you can convince people instead of trying to silence The tools you referred to are tools to silence, so you are "trying to silence" every time you flag or downvote a post. As for refuting the misinformation, I regularly see posts doing this downvoted while the misinformation is upvoted[1]. This is particularly true in discussions on contentious topics. Thus, I'm not nearly as certain as you are that these tools would protect HN from a sufficiently dedicated group. [1] At least once, because I downvote it and the comment remains black.

asabjorn 7y ago

At this point I think most people are concerned about hate speech policies. Normal opinions are censored through these rules, and the claims of harm are rather dubious. Why should companies be trusted to enforce elusive controls on our speech? And is it fair that tech companies act like editors and still get Section 230 liability protections as a tech platform that no editor gets? The end result of enforcing political correctness is preference falsification, which have lots of very negative effects. This is a good video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzjqjU2FOwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzjqjU2FOwA

loceng 7y ago

Add then into the mix bad actor nation states who want to cause rife in your society, to disrupt or destabilize your democracy, who pay people to weaponize your platforms.