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Getting one of my comments banned by dang in his calm and substantiated manner was a wakeup moment for me. I like my discussions hot, but this was the time wher

Getting one of my comments banned by dang in his calm and substantiated manner was a wakeup moment for me. I like my discussions hot, but this was the time where I realized that keeping a discussion valuable and on point is probably more important than winning it in the grand scheme of things. Incidentally, it also gradually managed to cure me from free-speech absolutism. (By now, I think almost all Xisms and extremes are nonsense, but that‘s a different hot discussion to be had). This forum wouldn‘t be the same without him. Thanks dang.

fennecfoxy 4y ago
He he, yeah I've been told off a few times too. Quite militant with the things I care about but sometimes that needs to be tempered and he really does make HN a better place.
eru 4y ago
I also had pleasant interactions with dang. Thanks! > Incidentally, it also gradually managed to cure me from free-speech absolutism. (By now, I think almost all Xisms and extremes are nonsense, but that‘s a different hot discussion to be had). Just out of curiosity, were you in favour of absolute free-speech on a private forum like HN, or that there shouldn't be laws banning specific speech acts?
- endymi0n 4y ago
  It was more of a philosophical than a political support of free speech, minted by the same forces of the early internet (in a time of true single-channel mainstream media) that a lot of us older hackers experienced. It‘s just that over time I realized that in such a situation not the most accurate and consistent voice would win, just the most obnoxious, manipulating and brazenly lying. There seems to be a tipping point lurking behind „pretty free speech“. Counter-intuitively, I‘ve seen deeper, way more meaningful, effective and vulnerable conversation happening in places with very high amounts of moderation (EO Gestalt language protocol, Chatham House rules). Count me in as a fan of well done moderation these days.
  - eru 4y ago
    Thanks for explaining. Sounds very reasonable.
galangalalgol 4y ago
"isms in my opinion, are not good.". --ferris Beuller I find it interesting that you like to resolve conflict using passionate discussion. Some of my best friends are this way. I have always preferred to calmly put forward supporting evidence, taking turns like a card game. I always felt like allowing myself to become emotional when debating something meant I had lost. That is what my debate teachers said. But my friends felt if I wasn't passionate, I must not be invested in the conversation and had thus lost. It took a bit for us to understand each other. Particularly because I wasn't really invested in winning, just finding out which position was correct.
- scarface74 4y ago
  At my last job, I was brought in by the then new CTO to make their company “cloud native” as they were both trying to bring development in house and pivot toward selling access to our micro services to large health care providers. We aggregated publicly available (non PII) provider data from all 50 states and national databases. I never had a formal interview. We met for lunch through a recruiter that was helping him hire. We just talked like adults. I had no real non theoretical AWS experience at the time. But I had led projects before. He took a chance on me. After a couple of months and we got to know each other. I told him that neither one of us had time for “shit sandwiches”. We have a lot to do and we need to be able to be honest with each other. After a while, when we were just talking alone he would just be blunt. He once asked me “why are you coming to me with this shit. You have admin access to everything. Come up with a solution and let me know how much it will cost”. I would also tell him “you know in your heart that’s a dumb move and isn’t going to turn out well”. We had passionate technical disagreements. But if the argument was well made, either one of us would “disagree and commit” or change our opinions. We got a lot of shit done. Two years later, I ended up at AWS in ProServe almost exclusively because he pushed me to be better, more articulate, stretch myself, etc and the company had an exit for 10x revenue (small company - $30 million exit). I probably would have gotten about $50K - $70K if I had stayed or about $30K if I had exercised my options - not life changing money. But my two year sign on bonus was more than that at AWS. I still talk to him sometimes and he said one of the major motivating factors for the acquisition is how well my designs stood up to the growth and increase in traffic right after Covid and they could point at their cloud maturity - scalability, redundancy, etc.
corobo 4y ago
Similar, when I went a bit overboard feeding a troll I got a calmly worded request to not do it again and to refresh on the guidelines -- which I did. It seemed like a fair request. I've tried to keep it in mind since too. I also set my delay setting to 10 minutes so that I can self-mod anything that reads back a bit too snarky. That's handy. Something else was swapping out HN replies by email to HN replies by RSS. Can't get caught up in a flamewar if I only check once a day :) The moderation style here (light handed on first infraction, and ideally paid for the work) will be kept in mind if I'm ever running a community of some sort.
roflyear 4y ago
I guess. I have very mixed feelings about HN moderation, but not dang. I think dang does an awesome job. I feel like he does such a good job, that I hope he has a really good support network, and a great therapist, too! That's not an insult. Just that I can't imagine how hard it must be for him. However, HN guidelines are so ridiculous they feel like laws (especially in the US): you're probably breaking one of them with almost all of your comments. For example, here is one of the guidelines: > Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. What? Hahaha. The level of policing here (and how much it is up to interpretation) makes them impossible to follow! Again, dang is awesome. I wish him the best. I don't think anyone else could do that job.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  They're guidelines, that means they're not rules.
  - switch007 4y ago
    They may be de facto rules if you get banned or chastised for breaking them.
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      Yeah, but nobody's getting BANNED for using capital letters to express verbal emphasis in text. It's just a little annoying, and comes across too strong.
      - roflyear 4y ago
        So some of them are guidelines, others are rules, but which is which is not for us to know. This is obviously very healthy and constructive :)
        whatshisface 4y ago
TreeRingCounter 4y ago
> it also gradually managed to cure me from free-speech absolutism It's entirely unsurprising that people who appreciate current moderator behavior also have zero philosophical backbone.
- IIsi50MHz 4y ago
  I read OP's post as a change from an absolutism to pragmatism. Absolutists on any matter are at risk of behaving like paladins* or tyrants. The change I imagined from it was from "Any speech is good regardless of consequences." to "Yeah, sometimes there are better (such as, less hurtful, or more productive) ways speak, and encouraging that is sometimes helpful." * A paladin attitude: "Anything which supports my view is Right; any fallout from trying to enforce my view is Good; anything that doesn't support my view is Wrong; anyone who is against my view is my rightful enemy upon whom any harm is Righteous."
  - TreeRingCounter 4y ago
    "Free speech" is not the notion of "say whatever you want regardless of if it's helpful"; it's "don't prevent people from saying things that are subjectively unhelpful". Free speech "pragmatism" is essentially completely meaningless - if the belief isn't extremely hard-line, it rapidly degenerates to something that has zero moral consequence.

fennecfoxy 4y ago

He he, yeah I've been told off a few times too. Quite militant with the things I care about but sometimes that needs to be tempered and he really does make HN a better place.

eru 4y ago

I also had pleasant interactions with dang. Thanks! > Incidentally, it also gradually managed to cure me from free-speech absolutism. (By now, I think almost all Xisms and extremes are nonsense, but that‘s a different hot discussion to be had). Just out of curiosity, were you in favour of absolute free-speech on a private forum like HN, or that there shouldn't be laws banning specific speech acts?

endymi0n 4y ago
It was more of a philosophical than a political support of free speech, minted by the same forces of the early internet (in a time of true single-channel mainstream media) that a lot of us older hackers experienced. It‘s just that over time I realized that in such a situation not the most accurate and consistent voice would win, just the most obnoxious, manipulating and brazenly lying. There seems to be a tipping point lurking behind „pretty free speech“. Counter-intuitively, I‘ve seen deeper, way more meaningful, effective and vulnerable conversation happening in places with very high amounts of moderation (EO Gestalt language protocol, Chatham House rules). Count me in as a fan of well done moderation these days.
- eru 4y ago
  Thanks for explaining. Sounds very reasonable.

galangalalgol 4y ago

"isms in my opinion, are not good.". --ferris Beuller I find it interesting that you like to resolve conflict using passionate discussion. Some of my best friends are this way. I have always preferred to calmly put forward supporting evidence, taking turns like a card game. I always felt like allowing myself to become emotional when debating something meant I had lost. That is what my debate teachers said. But my friends felt if I wasn't passionate, I must not be invested in the conversation and had thus lost. It took a bit for us to understand each other. Particularly because I wasn't really invested in winning, just finding out which position was correct.

scarface74 4y ago
At my last job, I was brought in by the then new CTO to make their company “cloud native” as they were both trying to bring development in house and pivot toward selling access to our micro services to large health care providers. We aggregated publicly available (non PII) provider data from all 50 states and national databases. I never had a formal interview. We met for lunch through a recruiter that was helping him hire. We just talked like adults. I had no real non theoretical AWS experience at the time. But I had led projects before. He took a chance on me. After a couple of months and we got to know each other. I told him that neither one of us had time for “shit sandwiches”. We have a lot to do and we need to be able to be honest with each other. After a while, when we were just talking alone he would just be blunt. He once asked me “why are you coming to me with this shit. You have admin access to everything. Come up with a solution and let me know how much it will cost”. I would also tell him “you know in your heart that’s a dumb move and isn’t going to turn out well”. We had passionate technical disagreements. But if the argument was well made, either one of us would “disagree and commit” or change our opinions. We got a lot of shit done. Two years later, I ended up at AWS in ProServe almost exclusively because he pushed me to be better, more articulate, stretch myself, etc and the company had an exit for 10x revenue (small company - $30 million exit). I probably would have gotten about $50K - $70K if I had stayed or about $30K if I had exercised my options - not life changing money. But my two year sign on bonus was more than that at AWS. I still talk to him sometimes and he said one of the major motivating factors for the acquisition is how well my designs stood up to the growth and increase in traffic right after Covid and they could point at their cloud maturity - scalability, redundancy, etc.

corobo 4y ago

Similar, when I went a bit overboard feeding a troll I got a calmly worded request to not do it again and to refresh on the guidelines -- which I did. It seemed like a fair request. I've tried to keep it in mind since too. I also set my delay setting to 10 minutes so that I can self-mod anything that reads back a bit too snarky. That's handy. Something else was swapping out HN replies by email to HN replies by RSS. Can't get caught up in a flamewar if I only check once a day :) The moderation style here (light handed on first infraction, and ideally paid for the work) will be kept in mind if I'm ever running a community of some sort.

roflyear 4y ago

I guess. I have very mixed feelings about HN moderation, but not dang. I think dang does an awesome job. I feel like he does such a good job, that I hope he has a really good support network, and a great therapist, too! That's not an insult. Just that I can't imagine how hard it must be for him. However, HN guidelines are so ridiculous they feel like laws (especially in the US): you're probably breaking one of them with almost all of your comments. For example, here is one of the guidelines: > Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. What? Hahaha. The level of policing here (and how much it is up to interpretation) makes them impossible to follow! Again, dang is awesome. I wish him the best. I don't think anyone else could do that job.

whatshisface 4y ago
They're guidelines, that means they're not rules.
- switch007 4y ago
  They may be de facto rules if you get banned or chastised for breaking them.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    Yeah, but nobody's getting BANNED for using capital letters to express verbal emphasis in text. It's just a little annoying, and comes across too strong.
    - roflyear 4y ago
      So some of them are guidelines, others are rules, but which is which is not for us to know. This is obviously very healthy and constructive :)
      - whatshisface 4y ago

TreeRingCounter 4y ago

> it also gradually managed to cure me from free-speech absolutism It's entirely unsurprising that people who appreciate current moderator behavior also have zero philosophical backbone.

IIsi50MHz 4y ago
I read OP's post as a change from an absolutism to pragmatism. Absolutists on any matter are at risk of behaving like paladins* or tyrants. The change I imagined from it was from "Any speech is good regardless of consequences." to "Yeah, sometimes there are better (such as, less hurtful, or more productive) ways speak, and encouraging that is sometimes helpful." * A paladin attitude: "Anything which supports my view is Right; any fallout from trying to enforce my view is Good; anything that doesn't support my view is Wrong; anyone who is against my view is my rightful enemy upon whom any harm is Righteous."
- TreeRingCounter 4y ago
  "Free speech" is not the notion of "say whatever you want regardless of if it's helpful"; it's "don't prevent people from saying things that are subjectively unhelpful". Free speech "pragmatism" is essentially completely meaningless - if the belief isn't extremely hard-line, it rapidly degenerates to something that has zero moral consequence.