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> HN is a strongly self-selected group of people, with rules against bad-faith arguments I'd love to see those rules enforced someday. There are plenty of exam

> HN is a strongly self-selected group of people, with rules against bad-faith arguments I'd love to see those rules enforced someday. There are plenty of examples of such arguments to be found here.

tlb 4y ago
Please downvote or flag them.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  I’ll try, but there’s no way if the core argument expresses a sentiment a large enough portion of the thread participants agree with. I think there’s very little traditional trolling on HN (you likely won’t hardly ever see it without showdead on). The problem is when you open a thread that blatantly off topic (but it’s ok because nowadays we play really loose with submission guidelines, and use more general guidelines to invalidate more specific ones) The problem is these make it onto the front page, and it’s just disingenuous flamewarring all the way down. You’ll never beat that.
dang 4y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=likeliest%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- otterley 4y ago
  I meant for real, Dan - like bring down the ban hammer more forcefully. Let's get serious about cleaning up this place.
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Agressivenes in moderation (hah) can be counterproductive. Also, everyone has a bad day once in a while.
  - throwawayboise 4y ago
    It's a bit of a balancing act. If you're too ban-happy you'll get an echo chamber (some would say that HN already is one) and if anything goes the trolls drive out serious participants. I think it's remarkable that the discussion here is as good as it is, compared to e.g. reddit or other forums. There has to be a little room for jokes and sarcasm and "devil's advocacy," as that's part of how real people talk about things.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Exactly. The only people you should really be banning in an online community are repeat offenders who understand the rules and continue to disobey them in a way egregious enough to be harmful to the community. That's a far smaller set than "people who post bad / stupid / annoying things."
      - otterley 4y ago
        It depends on your goal. If you want to make a community in which you minimize the number of people who post bad, stupid, or annoying things, you would run it differently than one where you welcome that sort of conversation.
  - dang 4y ago
    You seem to be assuming that we don't enforce HN's rules. We do enforce the rules, but only on the posts we see. We don't see every post—there are too many. You, or anyone, can help by flagging posts that break the site guidelines, and in egregious cases by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
    - otterley 4y ago
      Do you maintain metrics on the ratio of flagged posts or comments to those you take action on? Or categorize why such posts are flagged/removed? I've only ever heard you say "trust us, we do this," but I can speak from experience that I have personally flagged some posts and comments that end up remaining anyway. This is, of course, your site and you can moderate it as you please, but the quality of participation has been falling (IMO -- yes, I'm familiar with the guidelines saying not to complain about it) and it's been turning off participants who otherwise would have very wise, informed, and useful things to say. For example, a distinguished engineer who did a lot of seminal work in performance benchmarking while at Sun and later wrote Linux's original source control system is gone now, dissuaded by the emotional and nonsensical conversations he was getting into here. IMO his opinions and insight are at the 99th percentile of in terms value here, and this site is far worse off for the absence of people like him. Anyway, I don't want to get into a big debate here; just wanted to give my two cents.
      - PopAlongKid 4y ago
        >dissuaded by the emotional and nonsensical conversations he was getting into here If they were conversations, then he must have been contributing to the emotion and nonsense, otherwise he could have just ignored it. I don't know who your engineer is, but in some professional forums, I have seen prima donnas leave in a huff because they just couldn't stand to be challenged and couldn't refrain from going off-topic by discussing the personality of the other person(s).
        otterley 4y ago
        > If they were conversations, then he must have been contributing to the emotion and nonsense, otherwise he could have just ignored it. This is the precisely the kind of crap I'm talking about that brings HN down, where commenters just assert facts with no information whatsoever.
  - FooBarWidget 4y ago
    I think dang is already doing an inhuman amount of work. He's easily the most active and most thoughtful moderator I've ever seen. He's a machine. Hard to imagine how things can be better than it's now unless we overhaul then entire moderation model and make it more distributed, like Slashdot (not saying that Slashdot specifically is better; it isn't) .
    - CyanBird 4y ago
      Dang needs to hire some of the old moderators of TeamLiquid's forum heh, that'd be interesting to see
MathCodeLove 4y ago
I very rarely see a bad faith argument gain any traction and not get immediately shot down here. Not to say it doesn't happen, but IME it's more common that a bad faith argument gets called out and flagged than it is that the bad faith argument gets support and stands.
Lammy 4y ago
Other peoples' intent is fundamentally unknowable. Labeling someone's speech as "bad-faith" is repackaging an individual's subjective dislike of certain arguments into a justification for denying everyone else the ability to evaluate that argument and make their own individual judgement.
- lazide 4y ago
  Which, if there is enough consensus, is generally pretty accurate and saves everyone a whole lot of brain processing. Only so many things can be evaluated and judged a day per person.
- otterley 4y ago
  First of all, we have to make reasonable inferences of intent all the time. Being able to do so lies at the heart of criminal law (see mens rea). We'll never be able to probe into the subjective heart of someone, but we do our best based on available evidence and tolerate the errors, while always trying to converge closer to objective truth. There are plenty of interesting things to talk about in this world. Not all comments are worth publishing or reading; some are deemed more valuable than others. Editorial discretion is one of the distinguishing characteristics of different discussion fora. Just like you could read a different newspaper if you disagreed with the editorial bent of one, a great thing about the Internet is that you can always start your own forum if you disagree with the editorial choices of an existing forum owner. And the startup costs are a whole lot lower, too.

> HN is a strongly self-selected group of people, with rules against bad-faith arguments I'd love to see those rules enforced someday. There are plenty of examples of such arguments to be found here.

tlb 4y ago

Please downvote or flag them.

the_only_law 4y ago
I’ll try, but there’s no way if the core argument expresses a sentiment a large enough portion of the thread participants agree with. I think there’s very little traditional trolling on HN (you likely won’t hardly ever see it without showdead on). The problem is when you open a thread that blatantly off topic (but it’s ok because nowadays we play really loose with submission guidelines, and use more general guidelines to invalidate more specific ones) The problem is these make it onto the front page, and it’s just disingenuous flamewarring all the way down. You’ll never beat that.

dang 4y ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=likeliest%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

otterley 4y ago
I meant for real, Dan - like bring down the ban hammer more forcefully. Let's get serious about cleaning up this place.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Agressivenes in moderation (hah) can be counterproductive. Also, everyone has a bad day once in a while.
- throwawayboise 4y ago
  It's a bit of a balancing act. If you're too ban-happy you'll get an echo chamber (some would say that HN already is one) and if anything goes the trolls drive out serious participants. I think it's remarkable that the discussion here is as good as it is, compared to e.g. reddit or other forums. There has to be a little room for jokes and sarcasm and "devil's advocacy," as that's part of how real people talk about things.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Exactly. The only people you should really be banning in an online community are repeat offenders who understand the rules and continue to disobey them in a way egregious enough to be harmful to the community. That's a far smaller set than "people who post bad / stupid / annoying things."
    - otterley 4y ago
      It depends on your goal. If you want to make a community in which you minimize the number of people who post bad, stupid, or annoying things, you would run it differently than one where you welcome that sort of conversation.
- dang 4y ago
  You seem to be assuming that we don't enforce HN's rules. We do enforce the rules, but only on the posts we see. We don't see every post—there are too many. You, or anyone, can help by flagging posts that break the site guidelines, and in egregious cases by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
  - otterley 4y ago
    Do you maintain metrics on the ratio of flagged posts or comments to those you take action on? Or categorize why such posts are flagged/removed? I've only ever heard you say "trust us, we do this," but I can speak from experience that I have personally flagged some posts and comments that end up remaining anyway. This is, of course, your site and you can moderate it as you please, but the quality of participation has been falling (IMO -- yes, I'm familiar with the guidelines saying not to complain about it) and it's been turning off participants who otherwise would have very wise, informed, and useful things to say. For example, a distinguished engineer who did a lot of seminal work in performance benchmarking while at Sun and later wrote Linux's original source control system is gone now, dissuaded by the emotional and nonsensical conversations he was getting into here. IMO his opinions and insight are at the 99th percentile of in terms value here, and this site is far worse off for the absence of people like him. Anyway, I don't want to get into a big debate here; just wanted to give my two cents.
    - PopAlongKid 4y ago
      >dissuaded by the emotional and nonsensical conversations he was getting into here If they were conversations, then he must have been contributing to the emotion and nonsense, otherwise he could have just ignored it. I don't know who your engineer is, but in some professional forums, I have seen prima donnas leave in a huff because they just couldn't stand to be challenged and couldn't refrain from going off-topic by discussing the personality of the other person(s).
      - otterley 4y ago
        > If they were conversations, then he must have been contributing to the emotion and nonsense, otherwise he could have just ignored it. This is the precisely the kind of crap I'm talking about that brings HN down, where commenters just assert facts with no information whatsoever.
- FooBarWidget 4y ago
  I think dang is already doing an inhuman amount of work. He's easily the most active and most thoughtful moderator I've ever seen. He's a machine. Hard to imagine how things can be better than it's now unless we overhaul then entire moderation model and make it more distributed, like Slashdot (not saying that Slashdot specifically is better; it isn't) .
  - CyanBird 4y ago
    Dang needs to hire some of the old moderators of TeamLiquid's forum heh, that'd be interesting to see

MathCodeLove 4y ago

I very rarely see a bad faith argument gain any traction and not get immediately shot down here. Not to say it doesn't happen, but IME it's more common that a bad faith argument gets called out and flagged than it is that the bad faith argument gets support and stands.

Lammy 4y ago

Other peoples' intent is fundamentally unknowable. Labeling someone's speech as "bad-faith" is repackaging an individual's subjective dislike of certain arguments into a justification for denying everyone else the ability to evaluate that argument and make their own individual judgement.

lazide 4y ago
Which, if there is enough consensus, is generally pretty accurate and saves everyone a whole lot of brain processing. Only so many things can be evaluated and judged a day per person.
otterley 4y ago
First of all, we have to make reasonable inferences of intent all the time. Being able to do so lies at the heart of criminal law (see mens rea). We'll never be able to probe into the subjective heart of someone, but we do our best based on available evidence and tolerate the errors, while always trying to converge closer to objective truth. There are plenty of interesting things to talk about in this world. Not all comments are worth publishing or reading; some are deemed more valuable than others. Editorial discretion is one of the distinguishing characteristics of different discussion fora. Just like you could read a different newspaper if you disagreed with the editorial bent of one, a great thing about the Internet is that you can always start your own forum if you disagree with the editorial choices of an existing forum owner. And the startup costs are a whole lot lower, too.