27 ms·
Ask Dang: What tools do you use for moderating HN?
Hi Dang,
HN is undoubtedly one of the best networks that I am part of. The site is very well moderated. Wondering what tools / help do you get in moderating HN?
- tjr225 4y ago[dead]
- wincy 4y agoI like to imagine Dang is just running ripgrep on an open socket in a terminal that’s streaming all the comments through then he swoops in like some CLI ninja and moderates chat it using this tool. I doubt this is true but oh well, a man can dream can’t he?
- Aperocky 4y agoProbably far simpler than whatever other tools come out in the end. With terminal utilities, the potential for automation is continuous - until the process reaches Shannon limit and can no longer be improved. That will almost never happen for a GUI program, they usually stop far short, and often cannot be improved/fixed at all.
- kccqzy 4y agoFrom https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... > The site’s real-life moderators are Daniel Gackle and Scott Bell, two wildly polite old friends. […] Gackle and Bell, by contrast, practice a personal, focussed, and slow approach to moderation, which they see as a conversational act. They treat their community like an encounter group or Esalen workshop; often, they correspond with individual Hacker News readers over e-mail, coaching and encouraging them in long, heartfelt exchanges. My impression is that it's just an old-fashioned manual process.
- kennethrc 4y agoHuh. Been pronouncing it in my head as "dang!" (like the "expletive") all this time
- jjice 4y agoOh man I just got this too. Dan G. Jeez. I'm going to pretend I didn't see that, but what a minor change to something I interact with every day. Neat!
- daxfohl 4y agoIt's like that Seinfeld episode. https://seinfeld.fandom.com/wiki/Donna_Chang https://seinfeld.fandom.com/wiki/Donna_Chang
- tjr 4y agoNot necessarily wrong though! https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.5.0.dos.txt https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.5.0.dos.txt Login names are often used as nicknames, pronounce[d] if possible and spelled if necessary. My wife and I met at MIT, and she still calls me "Gliss", because my login name was GLS. "Guy" sounds very weird to her.
- benatkin 4y agoSome are more than just logins or nicknames, they're handles. I will never use substack.com* after they stole substack's handle. * as a publisher or a subscriber, and to some extent even as a reader
- Zecc 4y agoMy thoughts go to the person in my college whose login, based on their initials, was `acne`.
- spindle 4y agoThere's no way I'm ever going to stop pronouncing it "dang!". I'm sure dang knows this.
- 4y ago
- steve_adams_86 4y ago> often, they correspond with individual Hacker News readers over e-mail, coaching and encouraging them in long, heartfelt exchanges I've been part of a brief but very positive exchange like this with dang, and it's not an exaggeration. This is part of why I still visit the site; there's a real personal touch that makes this forum what it is. I felt stupid about a comment I'd left and thought "ugh, I should ask someone to delete this". dang responded saying it was a great comment and that I should consider keeping it as it was the kind of content he felt made HN a constructive and interesting place. I was totally caught off-guard.
- daniel_iversen 4y agoI also had the pleasure of dang’s help and kindness when I posted something that could be seen as inappropriate as our company was in the process of our public listing, and he was kind enough to help me delete it.
- mettamage 4y agoSimilar experiences here
- swyx 4y agowait what? dang responded to a thought you had? i mean he’s good but nobodys THAT good
- flangola7 4y agoI wonder how (if?) they prevent NLP bots and influence campaigns.
- dang 4y agoNLP bots we're just in the early stages of dealing with. So far we're relying on community members to tell us about them (so if you think you're seeing that, please let us know! hn@ycombinator.com). Influence campaigns are an older problem, so we have many years' worth of defenses built up, although it's an arms race where the influencers also evolve. I'm aware that I didn't answer the "how" part of your question—the trouble is that there's no secure way to do it, so everything relies on a stack of ad hoc techniques that would stop working if we published them. It's basically the old "I'd tell you but then I'd have to kill you" joke. But the answer to the "if" part is yes.
- tptacek 4y agoBell hasn't been affiliated with HN in quite awhile, for whatever that's worth.
- divbzero 4y agoThere is at least one macro that dang uses, for expanding past threads about a topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34913653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34913653 But on the whole it does seem like the old-fashioned method of clear consistent communication.
- keyle 4y agoThanks, this let me down the rabbit hole of finding out what "Esalen" is about... Fascinating.
- avhception 4y agoMind sharing?
- veqq 4y agoEsalen's a retreat for the human potential movement, which centers on selfactualizing yourself, through New Age spiritual things, alternative medicine etc.
- bobleeswagger 4y ago> often, they correspond with individual Hacker News readers over e-mail, coaching and encouraging them in long, heartfelt exchanges. I think this is outdated, or flat out not true. I have had particularly sour engagements with dang specifically. I asked him to reach out to me via email and he just kept pushing the matter in public. Pretty poor handling all around, and completely lacking inclusivity or self-awareness for a "seasoned professional." I'm glad it's daisies and roses for most of you, but some of us have not seen such kindness. Ultimately you have to ask yourself if moderation has fostered an environment of growth and evolution, or an echo chamber. In my experience I have seen more of the latter on HN, and it's concerning.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kergonath 4y ago> I think this is outdated, or flat out not true. It is entirely true, as of a couple of weeks ago.
- bobleeswagger 4y agoLike I said, I'm still waiting to experience it. As far as I can tell, most moderation of HN is done in public, not in private over email.
- dang 4y agoI probably spend more time in email than on the site, unfortunately—or at least it feels that way. I hear you that you didn't get a satisfying email response, and I'm sorry about that. It's possible that I screwed up. Actually, it's likely that I screwed up, because you're posting this some time later and it's my job not to leave people feeling this way. Without details, though, it's impossible to say what happened. I probably wouldn't email a user who just said "email me" in a public comment. But if you wrote in to hn@ycombinator.com and I didn't read or hear you or reply in a way that met your concern, then I'm sorry.
- password4321 4y agoMost recent discussion (Feb 2022): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374040 Specific mention of a custom browser extension: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374040#30378776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374040#30378776
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mooreds 4y agoI've received a few emails from Dang and can confirm it's a very human interaction, even if he is slapping your wrist for behavior that breaks site norms.
- corobo 4y agoDan has a great way of telling you off that makes you come out of the situation like ".. aye, that's fair actually. No worries, I'll avoid doing it in future" You don't often see de-escalation on the internet. Especially between moderator and user when they could just as easily disappear you from the site. It works well.
- wanderingmind 4y agoAs a specific sub question, all HN data is stored in BigQuery. Is the data updated close to realtime and does dang uses any GCP tool to moderate content?
- jhugo 4y agoIt doesn't seem like anywhere near enough data to need "big data" tools for moderation. A moderator for HN can simply skim-read what's posted, with a bias towards stuff that's on or near the front page (since there is little sense in moderating stuff the community has already moderated themselves).
- smt88 4y agoThere's a lot of automated moderation too that's intended to prevent brigading, spam, astroturfing, etc. If you consider that HN logs every hit, click, vote, thread collapse, etc., then it is big data.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dang 4y agoIt's not really big data by modern standards. Something like 13M lines of logging a day and less than 1.5 GB.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- weare138 4y agoA really big killfile.
- mmastrac 4y agoImagine a cross between Lisp, HTML, and The Matrix.
- nurettin 4y agoIt's probably lisp all the way down.
- rurban 4y agoIt's probably a browser all the way down
- rkagerer 4y agoEmpathy and wisdom
- charcircuit 4y ago* Users can be put into a state where their posts get downranked and their posts are rate limited * Users can be banned * IPs can be banned * Websites can be banned * Posts can be deleted * Submissions can be deleted * Submissions can be merged * Submissions can be renamed Those are the main tools I know of
- fIREpOK 4y agoI have noticed many of those too. > their posts are rate limited I don't like this one... if your comments are shadow banned or automatically hidden.. what's the point... There's also a lot of editing going on, but most of the time, they let you know what was edited, which is nice, thanks. When a "veteran" user flags a post, it apparently also gets a LOT of weight from what I heard... It might be why in some cases a post with a lot of momentum quickly falls off from the front page. There's probably other reasons too. I know that if a user has multiple accounts, they also somehow connect them together to the same person (not sure if it is automatic). They connected multiple of my account but not all... Dang confirmed it (I try to increase privacy by switching account once in a while) When you get 500 karma, you can down-vote...
- krapp 4y ago> if your comments are shadow banned or automatically hidden.. what's the point... The point is to prevent your continued participation in the community from doing more harm or, in the case of filters like rate limiting, to frustrate you until you leave or apologize and ask for the filter to be removed.
- korroziya 4y ago[flagged]
- krapp 4y agoYou're not entirely wrong, but that's been baked into HN since the beginning, and yes it is absolutely the owners' choice to make. It's their house, their priorities, their rules. But if it helps, they didn't even used to warn people beforehand. PG just pushed the button on you and you might not even know you were shadowbanned for years. At least you can vouch up unfairly banned comments now, and the mods give you warning.
- MichaelMoser123 4y agoi wonder if someone out there is already using ChatGPT for moderation, and if some other site is already witnessing to an epic battle between the bots...
- telis 4y agoIt’s definitely a thing - but it would be used for augmenting moderation such as highlighting tone and flagging comments etc.
- junon 4y agoDang is a great moderator. I've had a couple interactions with him over email and while I might not particularly agree with everything he does site-wide he's at least principled and consistent. I've yet to wonder how he comes to his conclusions. He deserves all the praise.
- batch12 4y agoWhen do they sleep?
- Razengan 4y agoMore importantly, where?
- 752963e64 4y ago[dead]
- andrewstuart 4y agoYeah how about some screenshots?
- monero-xmr 4y agoMy biggest issue is that controversial opinions are buried. It’s too easy for users to flag content they disagree with and then unflagging takes too long. On any topic, there is an acceptable HN Overton window of acceptable opinions and it skews very Silicon Valley. This window is too small for debate. Personally I enjoy reading reasoned, logical, rational arguments that I disagree with because it interests me. But if you throw a bomb here it is defused far too quickly for my taste.
- korroziya 4y ago[flagged]
- monero-xmr 4y agoThere is a political thing but there is also just an HN thing. Like rust - I gave it a whirl, didn’t like it, think it’s overrated. Mention that here and it’s like you tried to shoot the Pope.
- tptacek 4y agoIt's almost like people like getting into sprawling, noisy fights about programming languages and editors.
- ihatepython 4y agoResistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
- yesenadam 4y agoThe GP said "it skews very Silicon Valley" and you seemed to think they meant "left-wing", but I think of SV and HN as kind of..right-wing, in a word. Calling HN "left-wing" seems just staggeringly bizarre to me. As dang has pointed out a thousand times, HN seems to each user the opposite of what they are.
- bobleeswagger 4y ago
- phendrenad2 4y agoRemember the computer scene from the film Minority Report?
- 41amxn41 4y ago[flagged]
- indigodaddy 4y agoYour comment is highly worthy of moderation
- 41amxn41 4y agoIt's fine to step out to the danger zone once in a while, you should try it. Just don't go overboard
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago[flagged]
- bobleeswagger 4y ago> All we have to lose is our chains. Instead, we polish them. Is this your quote, or someone elses?
- tjr225 4y ago[dead]
- Razengan 4y agoAs others here have said, HN does not allow dissenting opinions. You can get downvoted into the gray by a few users, preventing thousands from seeing what you said (unless they look for it), and you can get stalked/grudge-downvoted, and then it limits you from posting more comments. Sure, HN has "smarter" discussions and likes to masquerade as some sort of upscale establishment, high and above the petty squabbles of Eslewhere, but when it comes to any topic on which people have varied opinions, this place too devolves into a predictable echo chamber just like the rest of them. This did not happen overnight; I noticed this trend deliberately forming a few years ago, when I started seeing perfectly fine comments getting buried almost instantly. This community does not brook any disagreement, because this service is not designed for it, and the mods cannot appreciate these problems until they try participating as a regular user.
- manuelmoreale 4y agoI might be wrong but that doesn’t have anything to do with Dang moderation does it? Getting downvoted is up to the users and if the majority of the user base is made of people with a certain ideological leaning then that leaning will inevitably show up in the discussions and in the downvotes. I don’t think it’s up to Dang to correct that. HN can both be a very well moderated network AND one that doesn’t allow for a certain type of discussions because of the up/down vote system. Both things can be true at the same time.
- petodo 4y agoUsers are also abusing flagging feature to bury opinions they don't like and that's clearly something he can control. He is also banning users (like me) from submitting articles with "You are posting too fast" BS instead saying honestly "You are banned from submitting articles because XX", while I can post comments without any issues.
- manuelmoreale 4y agoI honestly don’t know if the “you’re posting too fast” is something applied manually or an automated system built into HN so I’m not going to comment on that. I do know that I only had to deal personally with dang once and it was a very enjoyable experience. As for user abusing flagging, again, that’s up to the users. It’s not up to dang to override what most users do I believe.
- imiric 4y agoWhile dang does a great job, I think he's helped a lot by the self-moderating community. Users here generally want the site to have civil and interesting discussion, so any comments that deviate from that are usually buried or flagged very quickly. Of course, this sometimes has the echo chamber effect where it's difficult to get an alternative point of view across, but I'd rather have that, than see threads devolve into wild tangents and shout matches. There's always Reddit for that.
- petodo 4y agoYou can have civil conversation with diverse opinions, what you like is called self-censorship, users here sooner or later discover that same as everywhere else if they go against HN hivemind opinion their opinions will be flagged or downvoted. Reddit is same in this aspect (besides smaller subreddits), so you are not really riding on high horse here looking down with despect on Reddit, because this is nothing else than Reddit sub for IT guys.
- imiric 4y agoI'm not looking down on Reddit. I enjoy and use it as well, but it's clear that _most_ subreddits don't encourage civil discussion, and moderation becomes much more difficult, even for teams of moderators. The fact that one or two people can moderate a community of this size, speaks volumes about the community itself, not about the moderators. If this place ever gets its Eternal September event (some would argue this has already happened), it will absolutely devolve into chaos. > this is nothing else than Reddit sub for IT guys Hard disagree. There are plenty of IT subreddits where the discussion is nothing like here. There's actually less of a hivemind here than on any subreddit, as there is some tolerance of dissenting opinions, as long as they're presented tactfully and they make the discussion more interesting.
- filoleg 4y agoHard disagreed with HN being just reddit for IT guys as well. On most reddit subs, you get banned/flagged/downvoted for simply disagreeing with the hivemind of a given subreddit, your tone doesn't matter. On HN, I found the exact inverse, you can bring up dissenting points with no issues, at worst you are going to get downvoted (but even that doesn't happen as much as one would expect), as long as you stay polite and reasonable. But if you are being inflammatory or act like an asshole, even if your opinion aligns perfectly with the hivemind of a given comment section, you are getting downvoted/flagged (often by the same people who would agree with your point otherwise). That alone makes the quality of discussion and the entire interaction with HN community massively different from reddit, and for the better.
- pknerd 4y agoDang! no response from Dang yet!
- sph 4y agoI bet a lot of small Arc functions he is able to eval directly from the website.
- t0bia_s 4y agoSpeaking od moderation... Please, could we have some explanations for flagging submissions? You cannot learn from it.
- petodo 4y agoBy my experience it's used same as downvote, people just flag comments with different opinion they disagree with, while they are on topic/civil etc. Today I learned there is also Vouch button I didn't notice before, not sure how exactly it works, but it seems it allows you to respond to flagged/dead comment at least, not sure if it somnehow helps original poster.
- petodo 4y agoYeah very well moderated, couldn't be more transparent, they shadowban you from posting new articles with "You are posting too fast" BS when trying to submit the link (and mind it can be any MSM site like BBC, nothing shady), while suddenly when you post comment you are not posting too fast anymore.
- amai 4y agoIn the future probably Chatgpt for sentiment detection.
- lazyeye 4y agoComment moderation is a perfect application for AI.
- greazy 4y agoNo it's not. Another black box for companies to hide behind. One of the best moderation bots out there uses a baysian approach to predict malicious changes to wiki edits.
- trasz3 4y agoHow is AI more of a black box than a human moderator?
- telis 4y agoYou’re right. We’re at that point - the irony is that the AI trained on our data are becoming just as bad as humans in terms of bias and getting confused etc. Regardless - they’re still quite green in the grand scheme of things and lack transparency or ability to dynamically shift at their core. Won’t take long to correct but for now, humans are still much better as crappy as they are.
- dredmorbius 4y agoA few bits I've observed, seen mentioned, or occasionally learned through email exchanges with dang over the years: Most of the moderation action on the site comes from readers --- what's voted up or flagged off the submissions queue, content moderation, and flags. If I'm remembering correctly, "Flagged" means that it's user actions, "Dead" can be either reader or moderator intercession (see, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12984398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12984398> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8628891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8628891> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30273707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30273707>). Users may also be banned, which will be tagged to "dead" comments or submissions. For specific actions, such as title edits or URL substitutions, email the mods: hn@ycombinator.com I've been told that including the submission or comment ID ("34920400" is the submission ID for this post) is useful as there are automated tools that latch into this and assist with the moderation task itself. I try to use the following format for most of my mod correspondence: Subject: <Issue>: <item title as presently presented> <item ID> Body: <post URL> <link URL> Brief issue description, e.g., clickbait title, bad automunging ("how", enumerations, and a few other terms often get truncated.), link disambiguation suggesting a better source, etc. If possible: a suggested fix. Mostly as this makes the mod's action easier --- they can use my suggestion *or* select something different, but don't have to start from scratch in identifying a solution. If another member's identified the issue, I'll usually point to that and the relevant comment. Close with "Thanks". I keep those emails as short, clear, and standardised as possible. They're not arguments, they're suggested improvements. My suggestions are usually (though not always) accepted. Example description from a recent comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34768459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34768459> (I'd either copied that from, or to, the email I'd sent the mods, full email would have included the title and post URL as described above.) Issues I raise are usually title or URL related, and occasionally nominations for the 2nd-chance queue (see <https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool>). I've found that most spam and self-promoting submissions / users tend to get picked up without email, though I'll note cases that seem to have been missed. I'll rarely highlight a grossly-offending comment though those tend to get noticed by mods in most cases. My email frequency ranges from a few per week to a few per month. There are numerous automated features, including some spam and dupe detection, weighting of various domains, and some "cooling off" algorithms for deeply-nested threads / highly-active commenters, and some stricter standards for "green" (new) accounts. These seem to work without direct moderator interaction in most cases, though they may misfire. Searching the HN archives for dang's comments (and specific keywords or topics) is a good way to get a fuller sense of site guidelines and standards than is explained in the Guidelines and FAQ (linked at the bottom of most pages). Dang frequently links earlier comments himself. I usually read with "showdead" on, and may flag or vouch dead comments as seems appropriate. Occasionally (rarely) emailing a vouch for something that seems particularly unfairly killed. If there's an area with which I've disagreements with dang over moderation, it's that I'd grant far more latitude to negative emotion and tone in comments from a viewpoint that's disadvantaged, intellectually rigorous, and hews closer to truth. There's a thread from over a year ago now ... which still bothers me, in that the original submission itself was a shallow ideological rant. Dang's admonishment in that case was itself flagged (which I believe is highly unusual). I do understand that HN's core consideration is "intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation" (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404>). Though there are times I feel that's better served by highlighting grave faults in source material or earlier comments. It's worth noting that that's probably the strongest disagreement I've had in my time on HN, certainly for many years, so it's exceptional in that regard. And that the instance is arguably close to the border, with my disagreement being as to which side it fell. I'll occasionally sense the same friction occurring in other threads. I've observed for some time that there are issues HN seems unable to discuss meaningfully, a frustration I've seen dang hint at occasionally as well. But in general HN has been and remains among the best general discussion sites I've known online since the mid-aughts. And I've been engaged in online discussions since the 1980s.