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Congrats Dang, you have done a wonderful job so far and moderate one of the most fantastic online communities out there. I am sure most of the job feels somewha

Congrats Dang, you have done a wonderful job so far and moderate one of the most fantastic online communities out there. I am sure most of the job feels somewhat thankless but I want to let you know I(and many many other users on this site) appreciate your hard work and dedication.

ghayes 4y ago
Maybe a good time to link to the New Yorker article on Dan’s work at Hacker News: 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... Thanks again Dan for being so patient and building one of the best online communities ever to exist.
- nomilk 4y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200315173643/https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://web.archive.org/web/20200315173643/https://www.newyo...
- walleeee 3y ago
  From the article: > “From our perspective, the big surprise is how little control we actually have. We have to play our cards very carefully and very wisely, or even that control will sort of evaporate,” Gackle said. “There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work. What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with individual users. That, case by case by case, seems to move the needle. But it’s very slow.” > “If we’re trying to change something deep, the ingredient is time,” Bell said. “Patience allows us to be ambitious—to imagine people being more kind to each other, for example. It sounds kind of crazy.” It might sound crazy but it seems to work. Thanks much Dan and Scott for all the time and effort.
codeddesign 4y ago
If by “finest” you mean a Reddit mob mentality for tech, then yes I completely agree with this statement.
- elefanten 4y ago
  I find consistently higher quality commentary and discussion here than any other open access, broad topic forum out there. Sure, it’s not perfect but nothing is. Can you name any alternatives that you’ve enjoyed more? Genuinely curious.
  - stuartjohnson12 4y ago
    My least favorite part of Hacker News are the folk who complain about the invention of slate tablets because it means people will no longer remember things because they can write them down. Not automatically wrong, but the top comment on every new thing being "this isn't new, the old thing was better, just [niche Linux sysadmin stuff]" is a bit tiring.
- dang 4y ago
  What do you think we could do differently? Serious question. I don't like the mob thing either but it's how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default). We try to mitigate it where we can but there's not a lot of knowledge about how to do that.
  - kolbe 4y ago
    I consistently wonder why posts critical of HN-affiliated companies that have stats like upvotes per hour and number of comments that would theoretically make them the top story getting pushed off the front page. Are there people whose upvotes count for more than others? Or are these actively suppressed? Either way, it makes it hard to have important/robust conversations when the people seeing them gets suppressed
    - dang 4y ago
      I'm afraid I don't understand the first bit - but in case this is what you meant: we definitely don't moderate HN to suppress criticism of YC-funded startups. That's actually the #1 thing of all things we don't do. There's tons of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... but the short version is that we know the community's good will is the only value HN has, so we try never to do anything that would damage that. Re the second bit: there aren't any accounts whose upvotes count for more, but if accounts upvote too many bad* comments and/or get involved in voting rings, we sometimes make their votes not count anymore. * By "bad" I mean bad relative to HN's intended purpose as defined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Relative to that, "bad" means snark, flamewar, ideological battle, etc. — all the things that zap intellectual curiosity.
rurp 4y ago
Hear hear! I have been on this forum for a number of years now and am continually impressed by the level of discourse. Dang deserves the lion's share of credit for that. Thank you for all that you do Dang!

ghayes 4y ago

Maybe a good time to link to the New Yorker article on Dan’s work at Hacker News: 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... Thanks again Dan for being so patient and building one of the best online communities ever to exist.

nomilk 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20200315173643/https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://web.archive.org/web/20200315173643/https://www.newyo...
walleeee 3y ago
From the article: > “From our perspective, the big surprise is how little control we actually have. We have to play our cards very carefully and very wisely, or even that control will sort of evaporate,” Gackle said. “There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work. What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with individual users. That, case by case by case, seems to move the needle. But it’s very slow.” > “If we’re trying to change something deep, the ingredient is time,” Bell said. “Patience allows us to be ambitious—to imagine people being more kind to each other, for example. It sounds kind of crazy.” It might sound crazy but it seems to work. Thanks much Dan and Scott for all the time and effort.

codeddesign 4y ago

If by “finest” you mean a Reddit mob mentality for tech, then yes I completely agree with this statement.

elefanten 4y ago
I find consistently higher quality commentary and discussion here than any other open access, broad topic forum out there. Sure, it’s not perfect but nothing is. Can you name any alternatives that you’ve enjoyed more? Genuinely curious.
- stuartjohnson12 4y ago
  My least favorite part of Hacker News are the folk who complain about the invention of slate tablets because it means people will no longer remember things because they can write them down. Not automatically wrong, but the top comment on every new thing being "this isn't new, the old thing was better, just [niche Linux sysadmin stuff]" is a bit tiring.
dang 4y ago
What do you think we could do differently? Serious question. I don't like the mob thing either but it's how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default). We try to mitigate it where we can but there's not a lot of knowledge about how to do that.
- kolbe 4y ago
  I consistently wonder why posts critical of HN-affiliated companies that have stats like upvotes per hour and number of comments that would theoretically make them the top story getting pushed off the front page. Are there people whose upvotes count for more than others? Or are these actively suppressed? Either way, it makes it hard to have important/robust conversations when the people seeing them gets suppressed
  - dang 4y ago
    I'm afraid I don't understand the first bit - but in case this is what you meant: we definitely don't moderate HN to suppress criticism of YC-funded startups. That's actually the #1 thing of all things we don't do. There's tons of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... but the short version is that we know the community's good will is the only value HN has, so we try never to do anything that would damage that. Re the second bit: there aren't any accounts whose upvotes count for more, but if accounts upvote too many bad* comments and/or get involved in voting rings, we sometimes make their votes not count anymore. * By "bad" I mean bad relative to HN's intended purpose as defined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Relative to that, "bad" means snark, flamewar, ideological battle, etc. — all the things that zap intellectual curiosity.

rurp 4y ago

Hear hear! I have been on this forum for a number of years now and am continually impressed by the level of discourse. Dang deserves the lion's share of credit for that. Thank you for all that you do Dang!