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With the little experience I have, I can see that capturing and promoting true quality is legit harder. But yes, you're exceptionally good at this. Super impre

With the little experience I have, I can see that capturing and promoting true quality is legit harder. But yes, you're exceptionally good at this. Super impressive! Thank you, again :)

dredmorbius 3y ago
The question of what quality is is the pursuit of one HN perennial favourite, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, though that book's treatment might be slightly too enigmatic. I've been narrowing in on notion of quality as, usually and/or generally, fitness to some purpose (which might simply be enjoyment or aesthetic response, though it's often functional). One corollary of this is that quality is dependent on the applied purpose, by which point, different assessments of quality based on different purposes will come up with different values. Again, online voting and response / interactions metrics (votes, comments, flags, reshares where such features exist) are only a very thin view on overall quality. As the meme says, when you've got an airliner and an incapacitated pilot, one skilled pilot is worth far more than a million untrained passengers. Translating this to content moderation introduces other issues: are the skilled / trained experts operating within their inherently limited areas of expertise, are they free of any compromising influences or corruption? But in general the view that "the crowd is always right" does seem to hit real limits. In practice, HN does put its thumb on the scale in all sorts of ways, some nuanced, some not. As of 2009 there was a list of well over 1,000 banned sites, there are permanent and temporary penalties put against sites and topics, member flags, moderator actions, banned accounts, and a few (mostly slight) privileges of karma (mostly at fairly low levels). A few accounts may benefit from name recognition or be crowd favourites (pg comes to mind).

With the little experience I have, I can see that capturing and promoting true quality is legit harder. But yes, you're exceptionally good at this. Super impressive! Thank you, again :)

dredmorbius 3y ago

The question of what quality is is the pursuit of one HN perennial favourite, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, though that book's treatment might be slightly too enigmatic. I've been narrowing in on notion of quality as, usually and/or generally, fitness to some purpose (which might simply be enjoyment or aesthetic response, though it's often functional). One corollary of this is that quality is dependent on the applied purpose, by which point, different assessments of quality based on different purposes will come up with different values. Again, online voting and response / interactions metrics (votes, comments, flags, reshares where such features exist) are only a very thin view on overall quality. As the meme says, when you've got an airliner and an incapacitated pilot, one skilled pilot is worth far more than a million untrained passengers. Translating this to content moderation introduces other issues: are the skilled / trained experts operating within their inherently limited areas of expertise, are they free of any compromising influences or corruption? But in general the view that "the crowd is always right" does seem to hit real limits. In practice, HN does put its thumb on the scale in all sorts of ways, some nuanced, some not. As of 2009 there was a list of well over 1,000 banned sites, there are permanent and temporary penalties put against sites and topics, member flags, moderator actions, banned accounts, and a few (mostly slight) privileges of karma (mostly at fairly low levels). A few accounts may benefit from name recognition or be crowd favourites (pg comes to mind).