5 ms·

Agreed. Kinda makes you wonder why other communities haven’t been able to reproduce the level of quality and civility (I know HN is still far from perfect, but

Agreed. Kinda makes you wonder why other communities haven’t been able to reproduce the level of quality and civility (I know HN is still far from perfect, but night and day vs. other platforms). A great community to be a part of, and much appreciation to those that oversee and contribute to the high quality and respectful discussions.

greeklish 5y ago
On HN there's the process of shadowbanning entire users accounts. By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too. Since I was a teenager, in the vBulletin v3+ forums era, I've wanted to develop an access control / rate limiting system where moderators would be responsible for categorizing posts depending on the contents of the submitted posts and the user who created them.
- nrb 5y ago
  There’s no shortage of constructive/valuable content by people who don’t also regularly spam or troll, they likely stick around _because_ the low-value commenters get shadowbanned.
- muzani 5y ago
  I regularly "report" behaving shadowbanned people. If someone has gone a while only saying productive things, the system unbans them. On the other hand, I'm surprised how profilic certain people are. They get absolutely no feedback, but will go around trolling people several times a day.
  - dang 5y ago
    We have to unban accounts manually, though users of course can still vouch for their comments in the meantime, which is basically a per-post unban mechanism. If anyone notices an account that is banned that shouldn't be banned, they're welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want anyone to be banned if they've fixed whatever the original issue was and are abiding by the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
- dang 5y ago
  When an account has an established history, we nearly always tell them we're banning them and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... We only use shadowbanning when an account is new and shows signs of spamming, trolling, or serial abuse. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20shadowbanning&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... > By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too. That's why we added the vouching feature many years ago: so users can identify and restore the valuable comments made by banned accounts. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch.
- boogies 5y ago
  > By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too. That's why showdead is great! (The checkbox in your profile to unhide flagged and other 'killed' posts.) Not clear on if it unhides IP banned posters though. And I would like to try a forum that let you toggle it by category (IIUC Slashdot has post categories, though it peaked before my time and I don't know if they're used for that).
michaelbuckbee 5y ago
I think the biggest thing is size. HN is "big" but also the size of a large subreddit in terms of users.
dev_tty01 5y ago
Downvoting, which on the surface seems less civil, leads to more civil discussions. Just my opinion of course... Happy Holidays! I second the gratitude for all the work by dang and the rest of the HN team. Well done and thank you!
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  I was almost tempted to downvote this. But I disagree with you, so I won't.
gibspaulding 5y ago
There are lots of specific things one could mention - moderation, text focus, down voting, etc, but I think unfortunately the big differentiator is that (as far as I know) HN doesn't make money.
- srcreigh 5y ago
  Rather, the way HN makes money (helping YC founders advertise and hire) are aligned with the interests of the community.
1270018080 5y ago
All quality internet communities I've ever seen start with strong moderation. Everything else is secondary.
rumblerock 5y ago
I think the fact that the primary topics here are niche and therefore self selecting plays a big role - vs. open platforms (Reddit) that are not only much larger but low effort discovery wise. For me car forums still have that sense of community that is here as well, albeit a completely different topic and a vestige of the 00s design-wise.

greeklish 5y ago

On HN there's the process of shadowbanning entire users accounts. By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too. Since I was a teenager, in the vBulletin v3+ forums era, I've wanted to develop an access control / rate limiting system where moderators would be responsible for categorizing posts depending on the contents of the submitted posts and the user who created them.

nrb 5y ago
There’s no shortage of constructive/valuable content by people who don’t also regularly spam or troll, they likely stick around _because_ the low-value commenters get shadowbanned.
muzani 5y ago
I regularly "report" behaving shadowbanned people. If someone has gone a while only saying productive things, the system unbans them. On the other hand, I'm surprised how profilic certain people are. They get absolutely no feedback, but will go around trolling people several times a day.
- dang 5y ago
  We have to unban accounts manually, though users of course can still vouch for their comments in the meantime, which is basically a per-post unban mechanism. If anyone notices an account that is banned that shouldn't be banned, they're welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want anyone to be banned if they've fixed whatever the original issue was and are abiding by the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
dang 5y ago
When an account has an established history, we nearly always tell them we're banning them and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... We only use shadowbanning when an account is new and shows signs of spamming, trolling, or serial abuse. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20shadowbanning&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... > By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too. That's why we added the vouching feature many years ago: so users can identify and restore the valuable comments made by banned accounts. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch.
boogies 5y ago
> By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too. That's why showdead is great! (The checkbox in your profile to unhide flagged and other 'killed' posts.) Not clear on if it unhides IP banned posters though. And I would like to try a forum that let you toggle it by category (IIUC Slashdot has post categories, though it peaked before my time and I don't know if they're used for that).

michaelbuckbee 5y ago

I think the biggest thing is size. HN is "big" but also the size of a large subreddit in terms of users.

dev_tty01 5y ago

Downvoting, which on the surface seems less civil, leads to more civil discussions. Just my opinion of course... Happy Holidays! I second the gratitude for all the work by dang and the rest of the HN team. Well done and thank you!

kwhitefoot 5y ago
I was almost tempted to downvote this. But I disagree with you, so I won't.

gibspaulding 5y ago

There are lots of specific things one could mention - moderation, text focus, down voting, etc, but I think unfortunately the big differentiator is that (as far as I know) HN doesn't make money.

srcreigh 5y ago
Rather, the way HN makes money (helping YC founders advertise and hire) are aligned with the interests of the community.

1270018080 5y ago

All quality internet communities I've ever seen start with strong moderation. Everything else is secondary.

rumblerock 5y ago

I think the fact that the primary topics here are niche and therefore self selecting plays a big role - vs. open platforms (Reddit) that are not only much larger but low effort discovery wise. For me car forums still have that sense of community that is here as well, albeit a completely different topic and a vestige of the 00s design-wise.