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In its earlier days reddit was a bunch of bots talking to themselves. HN works because the official moderation is more of a nudge than a fist, the community enf

In its earlier days reddit was a bunch of bots talking to themselves. HN works because the official moderation is more of a nudge than a fist, the community enforces its own standards, and it's a relatively small niche.

dan-robertson 6y ago
The community kind of enforced its own standards (eg almost no jokes, especially no stupid Reddit-style joke threads). But I think moderation was more important. However much pg wrote about being curious or “intellectual honesty” or whatever, it was the change in moderation (to dang) that saw changes. But that sort of thing doesn’t fit all communities. For one thing this one is basically public (there’s no shared-private things like subgroups or DMs) and tends to have reasonably highly educated members. For another, the volume is low enough that dang can deal with it all with only some automated tools, giving a reasonably consistent approach to moderation. Also I think he is paid much more like a software engineer in Silicon Valley than a typical social media moderator. There are certainly some other more general things though, like the anti-flame mechanisms, the lack of more inflammatory media like pictures or videos, the lack of printed comment score and downvote limits, and the generally public moderation trail (though moderator may privately email users too).
- dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  I agree, I meant that dang and sctb have a style that is more about nudging people into better behavior than about demanding compliance.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    Doing that is worth a lot! Many will see something like that and give it thought. If they do, that is halfway there, maybe more.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    I'm learning to just downvote and not respond to troll bait, slowly. And I got my upvote points past the point where I can set the color of the title bar so I don't care about those any more which helps.
setr 6y ago
I think it has more to do with culture — the way moderation occurs enforces a certain style of good and bad behavior, and once the community is trained correctly, it becomes self-enforcing. And people have a natural tendency to conform, and if they refuse to, quickly leave to find another group more relevant to them. The problem with most communities is that there is no culture being enforced — whatever grows, grows haphazardly and randomly. It’s also why good communities tend to start small and grow slowly — and why eternal September is so deadly. If you have too many people enter the system too quickly, that culture can’t be enforced and trained before the next group of people come in. Rather than having the “elders” teach their ways to the “young”, it becomes the young teaching the young. As an additional influence, those elders tend to leave and establish new communities, making it such that the problem can never be corrected.

dan-robertson 6y ago

The community kind of enforced its own standards (eg almost no jokes, especially no stupid Reddit-style joke threads). But I think moderation was more important. However much pg wrote about being curious or “intellectual honesty” or whatever, it was the change in moderation (to dang) that saw changes. But that sort of thing doesn’t fit all communities. For one thing this one is basically public (there’s no shared-private things like subgroups or DMs) and tends to have reasonably highly educated members. For another, the volume is low enough that dang can deal with it all with only some automated tools, giving a reasonably consistent approach to moderation. Also I think he is paid much more like a software engineer in Silicon Valley than a typical social media moderator. There are certainly some other more general things though, like the anti-flame mechanisms, the lack of more inflammatory media like pictures or videos, the lack of printed comment score and downvote limits, and the generally public moderation trail (though moderator may privately email users too).

dec0dedab0de 6y ago
I agree, I meant that dang and sctb have a style that is more about nudging people into better behavior than about demanding compliance.
- ddingus 6y ago
  Doing that is worth a lot! Many will see something like that and give it thought. If they do, that is halfway there, maybe more.
- p1necone 6y ago
  I'm learning to just downvote and not respond to troll bait, slowly. And I got my upvote points past the point where I can set the color of the title bar so I don't care about those any more which helps.

setr 6y ago

I think it has more to do with culture — the way moderation occurs enforces a certain style of good and bad behavior, and once the community is trained correctly, it becomes self-enforcing. And people have a natural tendency to conform, and if they refuse to, quickly leave to find another group more relevant to them. The problem with most communities is that there is no culture being enforced — whatever grows, grows haphazardly and randomly. It’s also why good communities tend to start small and grow slowly — and why eternal September is so deadly. If you have too many people enter the system too quickly, that culture can’t be enforced and trained before the next group of people come in. Rather than having the “elders” teach their ways to the “young”, it becomes the young teaching the young. As an additional influence, those elders tend to leave and establish new communities, making it such that the problem can never be corrected.