5 ms·
These communities are lovely when they occur, but they tend to be small and ephemeral; it takes one single persistent troll who is good at gaming community more
by tsukikage 3y ago
These communities are lovely when they occur, but they tend to be small and ephemeral; it takes one single persistent troll who is good at gaming community mores and calmly wrapping complaints about any pushback in reasonable-sounding phrases to completely destroy such a space. I've seen this happen entirely too often :(
- XorNot 3y agoOnly if the moderators are idiots. Which most moderators are not: if one person is the bulk of complaints, then that person is the problem not everybody else.
- tsukikage 3y agoTrusting in the moderators to not "be idiots" - not make decisions you wouldn't - is a bit like trusting in benevolent dictatorship as a form of government: it works great, right up until it doesn't.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoYour point doesn't negate the parent's point. It still stands.
- joshuamorton 3y agoIs that always true? If this person is a minority and people are harassing them, for example? Do you remove them for the same if community cohesion or force the community to be more accepting?
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoAre you assuming that the moderator can’t actually see the harassment?
- tsukikage 3y agoI mean, this is “no vehicles in the park” territory. One person’s harassment is another’s telling the truth and calling things by their names, and while people will happily call moderator decisions obviously idiotic, they will vehemently disagree which decisions are the idiotic ones. Bullies are excellent at playing those strings. This stuff divides communities.
- reaperducer 3y agothey tend to be small and ephemeral I'm part of two such communities that each have tens of thousands of active members, and have both been online for at least 15 years. Generalizations are rarely accurate.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoHN is a good example of where the moderation works to a large extent, but it has trade offs that can be extremely problematic. For example, politically charged discourse is suppressed. That's going to result in a higher level of civility, but now you have a large community of people with an impaired ability to affect the political process.
- ghaff 3y agoPolitically-charged or at least on the wrong side of the line. HN does tend to discourage a lot of low effort flamebait which is generally for the good. But even politely-made minority arguments can easily be downvoted as well.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago"If I can't be politically charged on HN, I won't be politically charged anywhere"