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This is the tamest and most well moderated forum I've experienced on the internet. For goodness sakes, I made a snarky comment about an NFT marketplace and was

This is the tamest and most well moderated forum I've experienced on the internet. For goodness sakes, I made a snarky comment about an NFT marketplace and was firmly warned about it by dang.

Seirdy 5y ago
Ehhh... I'd say tildes.net, most project-specific forums (Discourse instances for FLOSS projects come to mind: Fedora, Let's Encrypt, F-Droid, Signal, and others), several mailing lists, and perhaps even lobste.rs are far more constructive. I've noticed that HN is just like Reddit, Lemmy, and other up/down-vote based forums for threaded discussions in that it incentivizes one extremely predictable pattern: Commenters have a first impression of what an article will say before they finish reading it, or before they read it at all. They take this anticipation of what the article will say, form an opinion about it, and search for comments that validate that opinion. These comments get upvoted. Because of this, commenters have an incentive to not just validate common opinions about an article, but opinions about what an article may be about so they don't have to risk considering its content/views. This phenomenon applies to the comments too, to a lesser degree. There's a recursive effect going on that promotes bikeshedding. While it shares this characteristic, at leas the discussion quality is better than mainstream social media (FB, Reddit, etc); however, that's not even worth mentioning IMO because comparing a forum's quality to them would be an insult to said forum. Several far less active forums like littr, subreply, gurlic, and tilde.news are far less toxic so some of this is probably most apparent with some popularity. I will say that the moderation seems excellent, though.
- celdon25 5y ago
  I am not aware of another forum in today's Internet that has discussion quality (or moderation quality for that matter) even comparable to HN.
  - Seirdy 5y ago
    I listed a few in the first paragraph, and a few relatively inactive ones near the bottom for a more slow-paced conversation.
  - kadendogthing 5y ago
    He gave a few examples, but to be honest HN filters for quantity over quality with topic discussion. It cargo cults academia but isn't actually very academic or novel. Spread out your thoughts in a PG style manner and make sure it's emotionally sparse and you're good. You can literally say nearly anything here, even to the point of it being disingenuous or hateful and it will stand.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      It's hard to be very academic when discussions are as massive and short-lived as on HN. I think of Lobsters as a lot more academic than HN, and the fact that so very few people have posting privileges there is clearly a part of that.
- blueflow 5y ago
  I've read the lobste.rs moderation log for a while and i think its a bad platform. pushcx bans first and considers second, there were several times users complained about it in the irc channel. I remember the time when the poster of the (at that moment) no. 1 post got banned for self-promotion, because it was a link to their own blog. The dataswamp domain ban also was a disgrace that looked like pushcx had no skin and a bad day.
  - throw10920 5y ago
    Oh, I thought it was just me - I was looking at the moderation log and thought to myself "is it just me, or is pushcx being awfully aggressive with the banhammer? nah, I probably just aren't seeing the really awful posts..." Although, you have to give him credit for a few well-justified bans from figures sometimes seen here on HN...
    - fivea 5y ago
      > Although, you have to give him credit for a few well-justified bans from figures sometimes seen here on HN... That's like praising someone who threw out the baby with the bathwater to give him credit on an outstanding work filtering water of any residue.
- aaroninsf 5y ago
  <thinks of Twitter's "would you like to read this first?" nag> Knowing it is likely non-viable, in the same way "pass this quiz to demonstrate familiarity with the issues on which you are about to vote" is non-viable, I wonder if there are forums which have formalized (rather than consensual implicit) proof-of-read friction in front of contribution to a discussion... Why am I suddenly envisioning a humanities/chattering-class distributed proof-of-comprehension blockchain, in which miners compete to consume and compelling demonstrate relatively dispassionate comprehension of successive argumentation in a domain not readily reducible to "data." Mostly kidding unless you are interested in being seed round DMs open
  - sidpatil 5y ago
    You don't need a blockchain for that. https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
  - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    If you could write up a "whitepaper" a couple of pages long and it was semi-coherent, I'm sure you could get some web3 vc to bite. Or form a DAO around it. Might never actually be a viable concept, but that needn't stop you in this environment!
  - mistermann 5y ago
    I think such an idea is viable....my main issue (as someone who can't program himself out of a paper bag) is getting not just funding, but non-silicon-valley funding, from someone I can also trust.
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  User comment voting has many more downsides than upsides. Pretty much every forum should have abandoned it years ago, but apparently it's never going away.
- ryan_lane 5y ago
  It really depends. If you say a facebook employee should quit because their company is toxic, you'll have dang on you in no time. Talk about killing homeless people as a solution to homelessness in SF? No problem. The moderation here is setup to avoid personal attacks, snark, and to stop people from shitting on YC companies, but for the most part, a lot of the most toxic parts of the internet are just as bad here (or worse) than other parts of the internet.
  - throwaway744678 5y ago
    This does not match my experience here. Can you back that claim a bit?
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    Did that "killing homeless people" comment actually happen (and wasn't made dead in short order) or were you using hyperbole to make a point?
    - ryan_lane 5y ago
      Literal example. They weren't saying "we should kill homeless people", but more along the lines of "the most effective way of dealing with the homeless, of course, would be to kill them, but that's not politically acceptable..." At the time I had seen it, which was hours after the topic was posted, it wasn't voted down.
      - fivea 5y ago
        > Literal example. They weren't saying "we should kill homeless people", but (...) Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and given that it only took a reply to water down the initial bombastic claim, unless you support your claims with concrete proof I'll have to write off your claim as hyperbolic misrepresentations.
        ryan_lane 5y ago
        It's not watered down. It's a person nonchalantly talking about killing homeless people as a viable solution to homelessness. The way you've edited my reply completely misrepresents what I said, to make it look like I've somehow changed the meaning. I followed up to give more specific language, not to change the meaning. This kind of comment isn't out of the ordinary on this site, so I'm not going to spend a few hours tracking down the specific post to prove it. Just wait for a similar topic, and you'll see similar posts.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  I've been on lobste.rs for a long time and I'm not a fan. Lobste.rs has IMO been progressively getting worse in a way that HN has not (which has, IMO, mostly stayed the same over my tenure here which is long, even longer than the time I've been on Lobsters.) tildes.net I have mixed feelings on but am much more hopeful about its outlook. They both have the same failure mode: 1. Both sites have closed membership with invites given to users. In practice this means that some users invite people but mostly a minority of users with very strong interests/beliefs end up inviting others who share the same strong interests/beliefs in order to shift the narrative. On Lobsters these are PLT enthusiasts and FOSS systems programmers, on Tildes these are leftists. All of this: 2. Makes any conversation about topics that the in-crowd is a domain expert in (on Lobsters: PLT, FOSS systems programming) good, but makes any conversation about other topics anywhere from clueless (networking) to just bad (scientific computing, machine learning). HN's breadth makes it a fantastic resource in a lot of more esoteric topics. Networking threads will have folks chiming in who authored core RFCs or who help run large ISPs. DB threads will have DB authors talking about block algorithms. Sure, political threads often draw some pretty bad quality discussion, but the top posts on most technical topics are often posted by insiders with lots of first-hand knowledge (though the moment you get more than a few posts down, that changes.) 3. Creates identity-based politics around the in-crowd. Anti-FOSS viewpoints on Lobsters are heavily criticized. Liking Go used to get you piled-on, though these days it happens a lot less frequently. Oppose software minimalism takes and get lots of pushback. Rules are fine to break if the in-crowd agrees with you but are much more brittle if the in-crowd disagrees with you. You have to have a thick skin if you want to oppose the in-crowd on Lobsters. The site is mostly driven by the whims of its posters and pushcx, which the rules are a thin veneer atop of. There's a lot of snide commentary and petty negativity on Lobsters and a lot of it is based around insulting members of other communities (insulting folks on HN is pretty much a pasttime for Lobsters.) The big differences with Tildes and Lobsters are that Tildes is a general discussion forum and Lobsters is not. Correspondingly, Tildes's mod Deimos has a fairly light touch moderating the website, which makes me much more hopeful about its ability to build a healthy community. Lobsters' current head admin pushcx is IMO an extremely overbearing mod who bans first and asks questions later. Sometimes I think a topic's survival on that site is based purely on his mood. If pushcx doesn't like something you're posting there's a high chance it's going to get deleted. While Lobste.rs certainly started out having a more technical focus, over time it has essentially become a longform discussion platform for folks in FOSS Mastodon circles. If something is popular in those circles it'll get upvoted and discussed on Lobste.rs, if it's unpopular it'll get booed. On HN you can discuss a much larger variety of technical topics and get reasonable answers from insiders. Just avoid the political threads and the flamewar-du-jour threads (crypto and ads right now, who knows what it'll be tomorrow) and you'll be fine.
User23 5y ago
As is so often the case on Internet forums, I’ve erred and let myself get heated here from time to time. Of the thankfully rare interactions I’ve had with the moderation team, it’s always been a positive experience. I never felt like they were trying to punish, but rather to cultivate an intellectually rich forum where they want me to participate fruitfully. It’s a pretty thankless job, so I’ll take this opportunity to say thanks mod team, in particular thanks dang!
deltaonefour 5y ago
A lot of that kind of thing slips through the cracks. Dang misses a lot of stuff.
- nomel 5y ago
  Even if he misses things, I think it sets the tone.
- ddingus 5y ago
  Yeah, that is true though Dang has remarkably few peers when evaluated on effectiveness. That said, we see his efforts and when we model them, we amplify an already solid showing. That's how I choose to play it. Hope it helps. I think it does.
danans 5y ago
> the tamest and most well moderated forum It's the most well moderated free forum. I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better, but that makes sense because people don't like toxicity in something they have paid for.
- labrador 5y ago
  > I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better Such as? I've been looking for someplace to pay for because it's better
  - danans 5y ago
    It's very topic/interest specific, not a general forum: Green Building Advisor. Also, I have some private email groups in which I only have thoughtful discussion with people I know and trust (though don't always agree with). I don't know if any general paid forums though.
    - tombert 5y ago
      There's Something Awful which is fairly general and charges a one time fee, but it's much more poorly operated than HN.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        SA used to be in a troll war with the old Slashdot.org tech forum. 4chan was a later 'spinoff' built by a Something Awful user, and taking much of its initial community from there. Given these facts I've never thought of Something Awful as especially free from toxicity.
        jart 5y ago
        They also used to be very toxic to the the Church of Scientology and Habbo Hotel. Nevar forget.
aaomidi 5y ago
It's also one of the most dog-whistled racist communities I've been on. Unfortunately, calling out that behavior gets you targeted as a SJW, or something else. But yeah, on some posts, I get really uncomfortable on HN.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  like what example
- gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
  I agree with your point of view even if I wouldn’t have phrased it like that. I’ve read / posted / shitposted stuff on here that would get me ratiod or yalled on other social networks, and would definitely lose me friends if I publicly repeated it, or family if I pushed it politically. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head because I read hundreds of stories per week on here and only notice it when I see a (not downvoted) comment that makes me go WOOOOOOW.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    Yeah I didn't really phrase it the right way when I posted that. But essentially my experience matches yours.
titzer 5y ago
Hardware Central forums circa 1998 was one of the funnest places that I recall. It was all overclockers and tinkers. It was pretty great!
suifbwish 5y ago
Same. If you compare this to reddit, it’s like comparing the senate to a local pub on free shots night.
hutrdvnj 5y ago
Sometimes I wonder if dang ever goes on vacation. Does he even sleep or take a break?
blooalien 5y ago
I was gonna say exactly this… It's absolutely true. Compared against almost every other comments/discussion forum I've tried/used, this is by far one of the overall generally sanest (free and open-ish) places on the modern web to participate in discussions.

This is the tamest and most well moderated forum I've experienced on the internet. For goodness sakes, I made a snarky comment about an NFT marketplace and was firmly warned about it by dang.

Seirdy 5y ago

Ehhh... I'd say tildes.net, most project-specific forums (Discourse instances for FLOSS projects come to mind: Fedora, Let's Encrypt, F-Droid, Signal, and others), several mailing lists, and perhaps even lobste.rs are far more constructive. I've noticed that HN is just like Reddit, Lemmy, and other up/down-vote based forums for threaded discussions in that it incentivizes one extremely predictable pattern: Commenters have a first impression of what an article will say before they finish reading it, or before they read it at all. They take this anticipation of what the article will say, form an opinion about it, and search for comments that validate that opinion. These comments get upvoted. Because of this, commenters have an incentive to not just validate common opinions about an article, but opinions about what an article may be about so they don't have to risk considering its content/views. This phenomenon applies to the comments too, to a lesser degree. There's a recursive effect going on that promotes bikeshedding. While it shares this characteristic, at leas the discussion quality is better than mainstream social media (FB, Reddit, etc); however, that's not even worth mentioning IMO because comparing a forum's quality to them would be an insult to said forum. Several far less active forums like littr, subreply, gurlic, and tilde.news are far less toxic so some of this is probably most apparent with some popularity. I will say that the moderation seems excellent, though.

celdon25 5y ago
I am not aware of another forum in today's Internet that has discussion quality (or moderation quality for that matter) even comparable to HN.
- Seirdy 5y ago
  I listed a few in the first paragraph, and a few relatively inactive ones near the bottom for a more slow-paced conversation.
- kadendogthing 5y ago
  He gave a few examples, but to be honest HN filters for quantity over quality with topic discussion. It cargo cults academia but isn't actually very academic or novel. Spread out your thoughts in a PG style manner and make sure it's emotionally sparse and you're good. You can literally say nearly anything here, even to the point of it being disingenuous or hateful and it will stand.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    It's hard to be very academic when discussions are as massive and short-lived as on HN. I think of Lobsters as a lot more academic than HN, and the fact that so very few people have posting privileges there is clearly a part of that.
blueflow 5y ago
I've read the lobste.rs moderation log for a while and i think its a bad platform. pushcx bans first and considers second, there were several times users complained about it in the irc channel. I remember the time when the poster of the (at that moment) no. 1 post got banned for self-promotion, because it was a link to their own blog. The dataswamp domain ban also was a disgrace that looked like pushcx had no skin and a bad day.
- throw10920 5y ago
  Oh, I thought it was just me - I was looking at the moderation log and thought to myself "is it just me, or is pushcx being awfully aggressive with the banhammer? nah, I probably just aren't seeing the really awful posts..." Although, you have to give him credit for a few well-justified bans from figures sometimes seen here on HN...
  - fivea 5y ago
    > Although, you have to give him credit for a few well-justified bans from figures sometimes seen here on HN... That's like praising someone who threw out the baby with the bathwater to give him credit on an outstanding work filtering water of any residue.
aaroninsf 5y ago
<thinks of Twitter's "would you like to read this first?" nag> Knowing it is likely non-viable, in the same way "pass this quiz to demonstrate familiarity with the issues on which you are about to vote" is non-viable, I wonder if there are forums which have formalized (rather than consensual implicit) proof-of-read friction in front of contribution to a discussion... Why am I suddenly envisioning a humanities/chattering-class distributed proof-of-comprehension blockchain, in which miners compete to consume and compelling demonstrate relatively dispassionate comprehension of successive argumentation in a domain not readily reducible to "data." Mostly kidding unless you are interested in being seed round DMs open
- sidpatil 5y ago
  You don't need a blockchain for that. https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  If you could write up a "whitepaper" a couple of pages long and it was semi-coherent, I'm sure you could get some web3 vc to bite. Or form a DAO around it. Might never actually be a viable concept, but that needn't stop you in this environment!
- mistermann 5y ago
  I think such an idea is viable....my main issue (as someone who can't program himself out of a paper bag) is getting not just funding, but non-silicon-valley funding, from someone I can also trust.
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
User comment voting has many more downsides than upsides. Pretty much every forum should have abandoned it years ago, but apparently it's never going away.
ryan_lane 5y ago
It really depends. If you say a facebook employee should quit because their company is toxic, you'll have dang on you in no time. Talk about killing homeless people as a solution to homelessness in SF? No problem. The moderation here is setup to avoid personal attacks, snark, and to stop people from shitting on YC companies, but for the most part, a lot of the most toxic parts of the internet are just as bad here (or worse) than other parts of the internet.
- throwaway744678 5y ago
  This does not match my experience here. Can you back that claim a bit?
- Karunamon 5y ago
  Did that "killing homeless people" comment actually happen (and wasn't made dead in short order) or were you using hyperbole to make a point?
  - ryan_lane 5y ago
    Literal example. They weren't saying "we should kill homeless people", but more along the lines of "the most effective way of dealing with the homeless, of course, would be to kill them, but that's not politically acceptable..." At the time I had seen it, which was hours after the topic was posted, it wasn't voted down.
    - fivea 5y ago
      > Literal example. They weren't saying "we should kill homeless people", but (...) Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and given that it only took a reply to water down the initial bombastic claim, unless you support your claims with concrete proof I'll have to write off your claim as hyperbolic misrepresentations.
      - ryan_lane 5y ago
        It's not watered down. It's a person nonchalantly talking about killing homeless people as a viable solution to homelessness. The way you've edited my reply completely misrepresents what I said, to make it look like I've somehow changed the meaning. I followed up to give more specific language, not to change the meaning. This kind of comment isn't out of the ordinary on this site, so I'm not going to spend a few hours tracking down the specific post to prove it. Just wait for a similar topic, and you'll see similar posts.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
I've been on lobste.rs for a long time and I'm not a fan. Lobste.rs has IMO been progressively getting worse in a way that HN has not (which has, IMO, mostly stayed the same over my tenure here which is long, even longer than the time I've been on Lobsters.) tildes.net I have mixed feelings on but am much more hopeful about its outlook. They both have the same failure mode: 1. Both sites have closed membership with invites given to users. In practice this means that some users invite people but mostly a minority of users with very strong interests/beliefs end up inviting others who share the same strong interests/beliefs in order to shift the narrative. On Lobsters these are PLT enthusiasts and FOSS systems programmers, on Tildes these are leftists. All of this: 2. Makes any conversation about topics that the in-crowd is a domain expert in (on Lobsters: PLT, FOSS systems programming) good, but makes any conversation about other topics anywhere from clueless (networking) to just bad (scientific computing, machine learning). HN's breadth makes it a fantastic resource in a lot of more esoteric topics. Networking threads will have folks chiming in who authored core RFCs or who help run large ISPs. DB threads will have DB authors talking about block algorithms. Sure, political threads often draw some pretty bad quality discussion, but the top posts on most technical topics are often posted by insiders with lots of first-hand knowledge (though the moment you get more than a few posts down, that changes.) 3. Creates identity-based politics around the in-crowd. Anti-FOSS viewpoints on Lobsters are heavily criticized. Liking Go used to get you piled-on, though these days it happens a lot less frequently. Oppose software minimalism takes and get lots of pushback. Rules are fine to break if the in-crowd agrees with you but are much more brittle if the in-crowd disagrees with you. You have to have a thick skin if you want to oppose the in-crowd on Lobsters. The site is mostly driven by the whims of its posters and pushcx, which the rules are a thin veneer atop of. There's a lot of snide commentary and petty negativity on Lobsters and a lot of it is based around insulting members of other communities (insulting folks on HN is pretty much a pasttime for Lobsters.) The big differences with Tildes and Lobsters are that Tildes is a general discussion forum and Lobsters is not. Correspondingly, Tildes's mod Deimos has a fairly light touch moderating the website, which makes me much more hopeful about its ability to build a healthy community. Lobsters' current head admin pushcx is IMO an extremely overbearing mod who bans first and asks questions later. Sometimes I think a topic's survival on that site is based purely on his mood. If pushcx doesn't like something you're posting there's a high chance it's going to get deleted. While Lobste.rs certainly started out having a more technical focus, over time it has essentially become a longform discussion platform for folks in FOSS Mastodon circles. If something is popular in those circles it'll get upvoted and discussed on Lobste.rs, if it's unpopular it'll get booed. On HN you can discuss a much larger variety of technical topics and get reasonable answers from insiders. Just avoid the political threads and the flamewar-du-jour threads (crypto and ads right now, who knows what it'll be tomorrow) and you'll be fine.

User23 5y ago

As is so often the case on Internet forums, I’ve erred and let myself get heated here from time to time. Of the thankfully rare interactions I’ve had with the moderation team, it’s always been a positive experience. I never felt like they were trying to punish, but rather to cultivate an intellectually rich forum where they want me to participate fruitfully. It’s a pretty thankless job, so I’ll take this opportunity to say thanks mod team, in particular thanks dang!

deltaonefour 5y ago

A lot of that kind of thing slips through the cracks. Dang misses a lot of stuff.

nomel 5y ago
Even if he misses things, I think it sets the tone.
ddingus 5y ago
Yeah, that is true though Dang has remarkably few peers when evaluated on effectiveness. That said, we see his efforts and when we model them, we amplify an already solid showing. That's how I choose to play it. Hope it helps. I think it does.

danans 5y ago

> the tamest and most well moderated forum It's the most well moderated free forum. I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better, but that makes sense because people don't like toxicity in something they have paid for.

labrador 5y ago
> I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better Such as? I've been looking for someplace to pay for because it's better
- danans 5y ago
  It's very topic/interest specific, not a general forum: Green Building Advisor. Also, I have some private email groups in which I only have thoughtful discussion with people I know and trust (though don't always agree with). I don't know if any general paid forums though.
  - tombert 5y ago
    There's Something Awful which is fairly general and charges a one time fee, but it's much more poorly operated than HN.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      SA used to be in a troll war with the old Slashdot.org tech forum. 4chan was a later 'spinoff' built by a Something Awful user, and taking much of its initial community from there. Given these facts I've never thought of Something Awful as especially free from toxicity.
      - jart 5y ago
        They also used to be very toxic to the the Church of Scientology and Habbo Hotel. Nevar forget.

aaomidi 5y ago

It's also one of the most dog-whistled racist communities I've been on. Unfortunately, calling out that behavior gets you targeted as a SJW, or something else. But yeah, on some posts, I get really uncomfortable on HN.

paulpauper 5y ago
like what example
gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
I agree with your point of view even if I wouldn’t have phrased it like that. I’ve read / posted / shitposted stuff on here that would get me ratiod or yalled on other social networks, and would definitely lose me friends if I publicly repeated it, or family if I pushed it politically. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head because I read hundreds of stories per week on here and only notice it when I see a (not downvoted) comment that makes me go WOOOOOOW.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Yeah I didn't really phrase it the right way when I posted that. But essentially my experience matches yours.

titzer 5y ago

Hardware Central forums circa 1998 was one of the funnest places that I recall. It was all overclockers and tinkers. It was pretty great!

suifbwish 5y ago

Same. If you compare this to reddit, it’s like comparing the senate to a local pub on free shots night.

hutrdvnj 5y ago

Sometimes I wonder if dang ever goes on vacation. Does he even sleep or take a break?

blooalien 5y ago

I was gonna say exactly this… It's absolutely true. Compared against almost every other comments/discussion forum I've tried/used, this is by far one of the overall generally sanest (free and open-ish) places on the modern web to participate in discussions.