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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/
by 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 agoI wonder how that approach can continue to make sense unless they hire more Lisp moderators.
- dang 7y agoI don't understand your point but I relate to the idea of hiring more Lisp moderators.
- threatofrain 7y agoIt 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 agoAt 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 agoThat 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoI 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.
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- flafla2 7y agoFascinating, 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.