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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.
      - notreallyserio 4y ago
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

Agressivenes in moderation (hah) can be counterproductive. Also, everyone has a bad day once in a while.

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.
    - notreallyserio 4y ago

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