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There are two full time moderators, who, as I understand it, have professional backgrounds and are paid accordingly. And I’d say HN was exceedingly lucky find
by zztop44 3y ago
There are two full time moderators, who, as I understand it, have professional backgrounds and are paid accordingly.
And I’d say HN was exceedingly lucky find these excellent moderators. Not sure you could replicate that success no matter how much cash you had to burn.
- Gud 3y agoMany similar forums back in the day were all volunteer efforts. What is preventing HN from being run by a volunteer staff? Don’t get me wrong, I think HN is great the way it is, I just don’t think paid moderation is a requirement
- elondaits 3y agoIt doesn’t have to be volunteers. The organization running a forum can be a non-profit, and charge users for the maintenance costs. In the age of people paying to belong to a community via Patreon, Discord, Twitch, etc. it shouldn’t be hard. There’s a lot of road ahead in terms of learning how to develop transparent and Democratic online communities… but as the shitification of the internet becomes critical, it’s a necessity.
- zztop44 3y agoOf course an online community can be moderated by volunteers. Many are. But this one isn’t. Many people learn that HN runs on a single dedicated server and figure it costs ~$1000/month in operational costs. But my point was just that this ignores the moderation, which is a crucial feature of this community. Of course you could try to recruit volunteer moderators to do the same job. But finding and training and managing them is not easy. Nor is dealing with ideological or interpersonal conflicts. None of this stuff is easy, and just because volunteers can and have done this work, doesn’t mean that “just have volunteers do the moderation work” is a solution to successfully running a big online community.