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Hi dang, Thanks in advance for all your moderation efforts that make HN the site we all love to use on a regular basis. I'm curious if you've ever considered

Hi dang, Thanks in advance for all your moderation efforts that make HN the site we all love to use on a regular basis. I'm curious if you've ever considered writing a blog post about some of the things you've learned from your years of moderation? You spend so much time on HN, you must have seen lots of patterns and have lots of insights on...well, everything that gets posted on HN to everybody that posts on HN. I'd genuinely be interested in reading it if you ever did. Cheers, a semi-anonymous HN user

Leary 7y ago
While you wait for his response: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
- threatofrain 7y ago
  I wonder how that approach can continue to make sense unless they hire more Lisp moderators.
  - dang 7y ago
    I don't understand your point but I relate to the idea of hiring more Lisp moderators.
    - threatofrain 7y ago
      It sounds like you guys were hired to be both Lisp programmers for the site infrastructure and moderators. Presumably as the site grows, you will need to scale more of you.
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  At first, the site attracted about sixteen hundred daily visitors, and Graham moderated and maintained it himself. Today, around five million people read Hacker News each month, and it’s grown more difficult to moderate. The technical discussions remain varied and can be insightful. But social, cultural, and political conversations, which, despite the guidelines, have proliferated, tend to devolve. A recent comment thread about a Times article, “YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views,” yielded a response likening journalism and propaganda; a muddled juxtaposition of pornography and Holocaust denial; a vague side conversation about the average I.Q. of Hacker News commenters; and confused analogies between white supremacists and Black Lives Matter activists. In April, when a story about Katie Bouman, an M.I.T. researcher who helped develop a technology that captured the first photo of a black hole, rose to the front page, users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions. The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns. The message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own. Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of Yuval Noah Harari. Not sure whether to agree or disagree.
  - madhadron 7y ago
    That sounds like the Hacker News that I know. It's worth trawling through the comments because you get gems among the dross, but it should be a trawl.
  - pdwcyl 7y ago
    I find that the opposite is true. Most comments are emotional, and I have to search for controversial comments to find anything objective/worth reading. Like Reddit, this site is biased to the political left (USA). I wish we could just avoid all politics in tech.
    - cyphar 7y ago
      I don't think it's possible to avoid politics in any profession. Teachers care about education reform, which is a political subject. Doctors care about the healthcare system, which is a political subject. Civil engineers care about building codes and safety regulations, which are political subjects. Accountants care about tax laws, which are an incredibly political subject. Social workers care about welfare programs, which is also a very political subject. You might not talk about it in the realm of politics while at work, but it has an impact on your work as well as the lives of the public. You could even argue that being "apolitical" actually means that your political opinion is that the status quo is acceptable, which other people may disagree with. For instance, some people believe that selling water is unethical because it's a basic human need which you should always have free access to -- saying that the status quo is acceptable means that you don't think that for-sale water is unethical. There's nothing wrong with that opinion, but it is an opinion (and a political one at that).
      - DeathArrow 7y ago
        I don't express my political beliefs here because I think I would be massively down voted. I think that's true for lots of other users.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- flafla2 7y ago
  Fascinating, thanks for sharing. Makes me reflect on the (relatively few) comments I've made here, and if I'm making a positive impact on the community.
  - dang 7y ago
    Oh come on. It's always the good users who worry about this. (I looked at your comments and the ones I saw are not only fine, they're exactly what HN is for.)
    - flafla2 7y ago
      Hey, thanks! And kudos for helping to cultivate such a great community despite its massive growth.
dang 7y ago
I'm late to this thread because for some reason I only just noticed it. Thanks for the nice comment! It's fun to hear from someone who is just curious. I do think of writing about HN, but not a blog post, because I can't think of a good reason. I don't enjoy writing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14431262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14431262), at least not that kind of thing. Somehow I maneuvered myself into a job that is basically being a writer...of that kind of thing. Writing because you enjoy it, or were born to do it, is the best reason; failing that, it could be a means to an end. But what end? I do intend to write about HN in a different way. There are core moderation topics I've been posting about and returning to for years now (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang). I'm inching my way towards distilling those comments into mini-essays, or discrete paragraphs, about the principles of HN: what kind of community we want HN to be and how to get there. I think there's an opportunity for a step change if we become more conscious as a group about what we're trying to be and why. The "why" is critical because the rules here can seem a bit lame if you think of them only as constraints. Many creative minds are the sort that don't see why they should respect arbitrary constraints. For such people, the way to win them over is to derive the rules from first principles: to show how it's in their interest to follow them because that's the way we get to have, and keep, an interesting community over time. That's what I try to do in moderation comments, at least on good days: not to scold people, but to persuade them. My intention is to distill all that commentary into a series of posts that can form sort of the case law, or midrash, or zoography, of the core topics around HN community. I don't know if anyone has noticed, but I already do that by linking back to previous moderation comments using specific keywords. Some examples: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20reflective%20reflex&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... There are at least a dozen of these. My idea is to consolidate that material into little essays that interpret, explain, and basically act as hermeneutics to the site guidelines. Then maybe, in the future, I won't have to type out a whole new comment on $topic; I can just link to the canonical explanation. In other words, I intend to write more in order to write less! Other than that, for learnings and patterns about moderating HN, your best bet is to lure me with the right kind of beer. Or just ask a question here.

Leary 7y ago

While you wait for his response: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

threatofrain 7y ago
I wonder how that approach can continue to make sense unless they hire more Lisp moderators.
- dang 7y ago
  I don't understand your point but I relate to the idea of hiring more Lisp moderators.
  - threatofrain 7y ago
    It sounds like you guys were hired to be both Lisp programmers for the site infrastructure and moderators. Presumably as the site grows, you will need to scale more of you.
thrwaway69 7y ago
At first, the site attracted about sixteen hundred daily visitors, and Graham moderated and maintained it himself. Today, around five million people read Hacker News each month, and it’s grown more difficult to moderate. The technical discussions remain varied and can be insightful. But social, cultural, and political conversations, which, despite the guidelines, have proliferated, tend to devolve. A recent comment thread about a Times article, “YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views,” yielded a response likening journalism and propaganda; a muddled juxtaposition of pornography and Holocaust denial; a vague side conversation about the average I.Q. of Hacker News commenters; and confused analogies between white supremacists and Black Lives Matter activists. In April, when a story about Katie Bouman, an M.I.T. researcher who helped develop a technology that captured the first photo of a black hole, rose to the front page, users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions. The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns. The message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own. Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of Yuval Noah Harari. Not sure whether to agree or disagree.
- madhadron 7y ago
  That sounds like the Hacker News that I know. It's worth trawling through the comments because you get gems among the dross, but it should be a trawl.
- pdwcyl 7y ago
  I find that the opposite is true. Most comments are emotional, and I have to search for controversial comments to find anything objective/worth reading. Like Reddit, this site is biased to the political left (USA). I wish we could just avoid all politics in tech.
  - cyphar 7y ago
    I don't think it's possible to avoid politics in any profession. Teachers care about education reform, which is a political subject. Doctors care about the healthcare system, which is a political subject. Civil engineers care about building codes and safety regulations, which are political subjects. Accountants care about tax laws, which are an incredibly political subject. Social workers care about welfare programs, which is also a very political subject. You might not talk about it in the realm of politics while at work, but it has an impact on your work as well as the lives of the public. You could even argue that being "apolitical" actually means that your political opinion is that the status quo is acceptable, which other people may disagree with. For instance, some people believe that selling water is unethical because it's a basic human need which you should always have free access to -- saying that the status quo is acceptable means that you don't think that for-sale water is unethical. There's nothing wrong with that opinion, but it is an opinion (and a political one at that).
    - DeathArrow 7y ago
      I don't express my political beliefs here because I think I would be massively down voted. I think that's true for lots of other users.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
flafla2 7y ago
Fascinating, thanks for sharing. Makes me reflect on the (relatively few) comments I've made here, and if I'm making a positive impact on the community.
- dang 7y ago
  Oh come on. It's always the good users who worry about this. (I looked at your comments and the ones I saw are not only fine, they're exactly what HN is for.)
  - flafla2 7y ago
    Hey, thanks! And kudos for helping to cultivate such a great community despite its massive growth.

dang 7y ago

I'm late to this thread because for some reason I only just noticed it. Thanks for the nice comment! It's fun to hear from someone who is just curious. I do think of writing about HN, but not a blog post, because I can't think of a good reason. I don't enjoy writing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14431262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14431262), at least not that kind of thing. Somehow I maneuvered myself into a job that is basically being a writer...of that kind of thing. Writing because you enjoy it, or were born to do it, is the best reason; failing that, it could be a means to an end. But what end? I do intend to write about HN in a different way. There are core moderation topics I've been posting about and returning to for years now (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang). I'm inching my way towards distilling those comments into mini-essays, or discrete paragraphs, about the principles of HN: what kind of community we want HN to be and how to get there. I think there's an opportunity for a step change if we become more conscious as a group about what we're trying to be and why. The "why" is critical because the rules here can seem a bit lame if you think of them only as constraints. Many creative minds are the sort that don't see why they should respect arbitrary constraints. For such people, the way to win them over is to derive the rules from first principles: to show how it's in their interest to follow them because that's the way we get to have, and keep, an interesting community over time. That's what I try to do in moderation comments, at least on good days: not to scold people, but to persuade them. My intention is to distill all that commentary into a series of posts that can form sort of the case law, or midrash, or zoography, of the core topics around HN community. I don't know if anyone has noticed, but I already do that by linking back to previous moderation comments using specific keywords. Some examples: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20reflective%20reflex&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... There are at least a dozen of these. My idea is to consolidate that material into little essays that interpret, explain, and basically act as hermeneutics to the site guidelines. Then maybe, in the future, I won't have to type out a whole new comment on $topic; I can just link to the canonical explanation. In other words, I intend to write more in order to write less! Other than that, for learnings and patterns about moderating HN, your best bet is to lure me with the right kind of beer. Or just ask a question here.