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The less related it becomes to the original post but how is gatekeeping that relevant, other than using it as a quantitative metric to use to simplify moderatio
by loceng 6y ago
The less related it becomes to the original post but how is gatekeeping that relevant, other than using it as a quantitative metric to use to simplify moderation decisions?
And of course generic topics are predictable. If you don't think global security, a generic topic, as important - of whatever planet you're from, or whatever countries/nations - whomever happened to be the first one to excel at capitalism first, and then the other to benefit from capitalism + lower labour costs to accelerate themselves to a global power - then I don't know what to say. You're moderating repetitiveness which is strange, like you don't like boring conversation, another quantitative/pattern based moderation metric vs. qualitative - strange gatekeeping, though I understand how it simplifies it and it is then a narrative you can state as a justification that doesn't require you to actually engage or understand either side.
And I strongly disagree that my comments are interchangeable with the other person's in this case - however yes, if some person is arguing in bad faith and someone else puts the effort into holding people to integrity and good faith, then that conversation will be predictable - especially someone like you who all day long you're seeing patterns of conversation, and adversarial, by definition - there's friction at the point of bad vs. good; perhaps you're bored and/or overwhelmed, so you just pattern match and create quantity-based decisions instead of qualitative to hold the space in a more nuanced way.
There's no question, just perhaps some judgement on the "dumbed down"/simplified moderation practices - ideally there'd be 10 to 100 of you so you could afford the time to not condense things in such a way.
Thanks for engaging.
- dang 6y agoGatekeeping that is relevant because moderation's job is to prevent the system from ending up in the failure modes that it will otherwise default to. By "the system" I mean HN as a whole: community, software, moderation, etc. Someone needs to monitor the global state of the system and intervene to nudge it when it drifts off course. Moderation is like a small feedback control mechanism to regulate that, and little else. What determines what counts as "failure modes", "off course", "on course", etc.? That sounds vague but it is actually easy to answer. We're trying to optimize for just one thing, namely intellectual curiosity [1]. Everything follows from that. For example, since curiosity fades under repetition, we try to avoid too much repetition [2]. Similar with nastiness. Repetition plus nastiness is sort of the essence of flamewars, so those are particularly a moderation concern. And so on. Actually the fact that HN has a clear definition of what it's going for, and it's possible to derive all sorts of interesting and counterintuitive consequences from that, is my favorite thing about the job. We're not claiming that any of these rules or judgments should be universal—simply that they're necessary for the kind of site HN is trying to be. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...