3 ms·

I’m all for pushing back against the mods. Lord knows I’ve done it more than I probably should have. But one thing I came to understand after my long slugging m

I’m all for pushing back against the mods. Lord knows I’ve done it more than I probably should have. But one thing I came to understand after my long slugging match with them is that they have a lot of concerns that are very hard to balance. In this case, here’s the calculus: how many valuable comments do you think were lost as a result of killing that word? The kinds of comments you’d read and think “I really want to come back here.” I agree it’s more than zero. But it’s likely several orders of magnitude fewer than the number of comments that were filtered by it — which is to say, if those comments had no effect on readers, or didn’t make them want to come back, then by definition it was a net positive for the site, and thus the community. Their duty is to the community. The decisions they make are for that goal alone: to collect as many smart people together under one virtual roof as possible, without us tearing each other to shreds. This is as hard as it sounds. The grim reality is that no other community has ever pulled that off. I believe HN will hit the 100 year mark in longevity. It’s already been around for something like 17. But to get there requires manual intervention at a scale not previously seen. Reddit is on autopilot compared to HN, and although it’s popular, few of us want to stay there. So when you rally people to fight them for censoring a word, what you’re really doing is claiming to know how to do their jobs more effectively than they do. And they’ve been doing it for many, many years. I once tried to launch an HN clone that for a time achieved small-scale popularity, and it took everything I had in me — all day, every day, mostly curating stories. I could do it, but it’s not fun (though it’s fascinating). So, try to cut them a little slack and look at the big picture. Are you sure that this is worth rousing everyone up in arms about? Then think it over for awhile, and ask yourself a few more times. If you really try to put yourself in their shoes, as if it was your full time job, then I think you’ll be forced to conclude “It’s complicated.” Or at least that’s the reality that I eventually accepted. There’s another word that was banned long ago, involving a circle of men. But as pg himself once said (paraphrasing), “I doubt we lost many valuable comments from it.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825942 The coolest part of HN is that you can have an effect. If you see a dead comment that you think will make readers want to return to the site tomorrow, click on its timestamp and then click “vouch.” It only takes one to unkill a comment. But use it sparingly, since it’s a privilege. It was a feature designed for just this sort of situation.

version_five 4y ago
Still seems odd to me. M___ is a comparatively formal term, and it appears a lot of slang is still allowed (in any event, that term is trivially easy to make up new words for). And even the circle word you mentioned, especially in the VC tech world is a pretty legit metaphor for a lot of stuff. Throwing out comments because they use a specific word is really low effort imo, on the same level as banning the f-word. I'd be surprised if it isn't mostly generating false positives.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  You're right that it probably is. My main frustration was with the "Posting too fast; please slow down" throwing away comments that you spent a half hour writing. I felt strongly that the user should get an override button, similar to vouch, which lets you post your comment anyway. Obviously, it'd be revokable if abused. But it's so easy for us to sit here and say all that when they're the ones in the field doing the work. If they added masterbation to the list, it's likely because they saw a lot of comments correlated with it -- comments that, again, would drive the average user away from HN over time, rather than keeping us together as a community. The false positives are "for the greater good" in that sense, i.e. the cost of doing business. It took me a long time to accept this, but there's honestly nothing wrong with that. I used to feel strongly that they were treating users immorally by taking such a callous attitude with them. What changed my mind was seeing how moderation is done on all the other websites. It made me appreciate that Dan is consistent – and especially that he's consistently clear with his expectations. The mod team has undoubtedly grown beyond himself by now (he's said as much), so it's also impressive that he's trained his team so well. All of the other mods enforce his same rules, which is no small feat. Just look at how hard it is for Facebook or Twitter or (heaven forbid) Twitch to get their mod team to be consistent. Dan's crew is so good that the moderation is almost invisible, which is as it should be. I guess all I'm saying is, similar to a canary in a coal mine, I'm highly sensitive to whether the mods seem to be overstepping and suppressing people or ideas. And if I had to point to a specific case of that happening since 2018, I don't think I'd be able to. Offtopic from moderation, but Dan's a talented hacker too. https://github.com/gruseom/numen/blob/master/numen.el https://github.com/gruseom/numen/blob/master/numen.el seems to be his only public-facing work, and it wasn't till I studied it that I saw just how capable he is at designing large systems. There are very few unnecessary parts in that codebase. I hope I get a chance to show him my Arc keyword args implementation someday. It dramatically simplified the printing routines https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/feb06f0366bff642e6d0e911a7c196235648dd81/arc.arc#L748-L765 https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/feb06f0366bff642e6d... and the dynamic form generators https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/feb06f0366bff642e6d0e911a7c196235648dd81/srv.arc#L567-L652 https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/feb06f0366bff642e6d.... Anyway, it just makes me feel a bit sad to see people saying he's low-effort. His efforts are concentrated in specific high-impact areas, which is as it should be. And most of it tends to be mostly invisible -- when he writes code to fight upvote rings or fend off DoS attacks, we don't see it at all, because he was successful. Time spent reconsidering whether "masterbation" should be banned is time not spent doing those other things. Or spent with his family, and having a life outside of work.

version_five 4y ago

Still seems odd to me. M___ is a comparatively formal term, and it appears a lot of slang is still allowed (in any event, that term is trivially easy to make up new words for). And even the circle word you mentioned, especially in the VC tech world is a pretty legit metaphor for a lot of stuff. Throwing out comments because they use a specific word is really low effort imo, on the same level as banning the f-word. I'd be surprised if it isn't mostly generating false positives.

sillysaurusx 4y ago
You're right that it probably is. My main frustration was with the "Posting too fast; please slow down" throwing away comments that you spent a half hour writing. I felt strongly that the user should get an override button, similar to vouch, which lets you post your comment anyway. Obviously, it'd be revokable if abused. But it's so easy for us to sit here and say all that when they're the ones in the field doing the work. If they added masterbation to the list, it's likely because they saw a lot of comments correlated with it -- comments that, again, would drive the average user away from HN over time, rather than keeping us together as a community. The false positives are "for the greater good" in that sense, i.e. the cost of doing business. It took me a long time to accept this, but there's honestly nothing wrong with that. I used to feel strongly that they were treating users immorally by taking such a callous attitude with them. What changed my mind was seeing how moderation is done on all the other websites. It made me appreciate that Dan is consistent – and especially that he's consistently clear with his expectations. The mod team has undoubtedly grown beyond himself by now (he's said as much), so it's also impressive that he's trained his team so well. All of the other mods enforce his same rules, which is no small feat. Just look at how hard it is for Facebook or Twitter or (heaven forbid) Twitch to get their mod team to be consistent. Dan's crew is so good that the moderation is almost invisible, which is as it should be. I guess all I'm saying is, similar to a canary in a coal mine, I'm highly sensitive to whether the mods seem to be overstepping and suppressing people or ideas. And if I had to point to a specific case of that happening since 2018, I don't think I'd be able to. Offtopic from moderation, but Dan's a talented hacker too. https://github.com/gruseom/numen/blob/master/numen.el https://github.com/gruseom/numen/blob/master/numen.el seems to be his only public-facing work, and it wasn't till I studied it that I saw just how capable he is at designing large systems. There are very few unnecessary parts in that codebase. I hope I get a chance to show him my Arc keyword args implementation someday. It dramatically simplified the printing routines https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/feb06f0366bff642e6d0e911a7c196235648dd81/arc.arc#L748-L765 https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/feb06f0366bff642e6d... and the dynamic form generators https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/feb06f0366bff642e6d0e911a7c196235648dd81/srv.arc#L567-L652 https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/feb06f0366bff642e6d.... Anyway, it just makes me feel a bit sad to see people saying he's low-effort. His efforts are concentrated in specific high-impact areas, which is as it should be. And most of it tends to be mostly invisible -- when he writes code to fight upvote rings or fend off DoS attacks, we don't see it at all, because he was successful. Time spent reconsidering whether "masterbation" should be banned is time not spent doing those other things. Or spent with his family, and having a life outside of work.