21 ms·

The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

• belfalas 3y ago
  > Still, as an occasional reader, I have noticed certain trends. When stories that focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace, or on diversity in tech, or on race or masculinity—stories, admittedly, that are more intriguing to me, a person interested in the humanities, than stories on technical topics—hit the front page, users often flag them, presumably for being off topic, so fast that hardly any comments accrue. I have noticed this trend for a long time also, and well before this article was first written. It seems to go in waves though I'll cautiously say that it seems to have gotten somewhat better in recent years. I remember a time in the mid-2010s when these kinds of stories would disappear almost instantaneously. Now some of these articles and topics get a good number of upvotes and occasionally even substantive dialogue. That said, the comments sections on these articles do tend to devolve pretty quickly.
  • nitwit005 3y ago
    A lot of articles do match the very first thing in the guideline's list of what's off topic: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Specifically, there is this tendency to briefly discuss some new social issue, but then filling the rest of the article with discussion of the current political situation.
    • leononame 3y ago
      Just cause they are related to humanities or discuss masculinity, minorities or race in tech doesn't make them political by default. A topic being discussed a lot in politics doesn't necessarily mean that that topic is political imo
      • nitwit005 3y ago
        You don't appear to have read what I wrote very carefully. The problem is that they fill most of the article with a general discussion of politics, making the article mostly about general politics. People are naturally going to flag such an article.
        • leononame 3y ago
          Right, I'm sorry. I misread that
        • dang 3y ago
          That's true. And there's the additional factor that the more familiar a topic is, the more likely the thread is to fill up with generic comments about it. That's what the HN guidelines call generic tangents: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Those are probably the most repetitive kinds of thread, and therefore the least valuable. This phenomenon shows up in most political threads but also in threads that aren't particularly political. The more generic topics have so much mass that they act like black holes that suck in all the interesting discussion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
      • woooooo 3y ago
        Sturgeon's Law, though. The average article on all of those topics is a pile of political flamebait.
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      The devil is in the details, though: >unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. And that's where we will never truly agree until the topic runs super sour. Which can take months. > there is this tendency to briefly discuss some new social issue, but then filling the rest of the article with discussion of the current political situation. it makes sense for multiple reasons, no? You never want to assume the general audience is caught up on every little piece of an evolving story, be it a simple celebrity drama or some complex political issue. It's news, not a research paper.
  • leononame 3y ago
    I agree that the comment sections on those articles devolves really quickly. To me, those comment sections are the worst part of HN. The normally very civil discourse found in here tends to be more "reddity". Of course, I don't have a concrete example right now. But I do tend to stay off those topics in here cuase it feels like a shit show. Really makes me sad because the comment sections on other non-tech topics like music or literature are always interesting to read.
    • mxkopy 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • arp242 3y ago
        That is a spectacular bad faith reading of what was actually said. They just tried to explain why birth rated dropped, with no judgements being made one way or the other. They absolutely did not claim that "women’s purpose is to keep them high". They even clarified that in a follow-up: "I think you misinterpreted my words: it's fantastic that humans (both men and women) have more options, if they choose to have less kids that's noone's business but their own."
        • mxkopy 3y ago
          Read: > Empowerment of women made "get married and out of your parents house" a less interesting option…Having children is just another bucket list item these days. It’s a slimy comment blaming women’s opportunities for declining birth rates. How you expect anyone to read that in good faith, I have no clue.
          • arp242 3y ago
            Trying to explain something ("A led to B") is not blaming. And again, the poster followed up clarifying that. Constantly taking the worst possible interpretation of everything and divining the worst possible malicious motivations at the drop of a hat is one of the main reasons these debates turn in to such drek all the time.
  • Pannoniae 3y ago
    It's understandable that they get flagged because people can't talk about these topics without emotions and it almost always derails into a flamewar.
    • vector_spaces 3y ago
      The implications here are interesting -- that discussing with emotion is something to avoid or that it's even possible to avoid at all. We're human -- as much as doing so has been a cultural aspiration for millenia in the West, it is simply not possible to decouple ourselves from our physical and emotional experiences. In my mind, it's far less important that we try to address these topics "without emotion" (whatever that means) and instead focus on cultivating respect and curiosity and assuming good faith. This is a bit more congruous with the spirit of the site. There's another Western cultural aspiration involving an impossible decoupling, probably more common in American culture than European, which is to depersonalize politics. But politics is about people, and some people are much less immediately affected by political and social issues than others -- there's usually a great many layers of indirection between the articulation of a regressive point of view or support for a particular law or politician, and e.g. a minority being squished out of tech or a parent who was a victim of a hate crime or a queer person's suicide. There are probably especially many layers of indirection when it comes to a lot of tech workers, given the demographics. In any case, when discussing politics and issues of class and race it's important to recognize that you're not talking about something abstract, but people, and their loved ones and families. Given that, it's hardly a level playing field if we start with the expectation that folks will leave emotion at the door
      • whatshisface 3y ago
        "Discussing with emotion" is an euphemism for "saying things that you would not normally say unless you were thrown off kilter by your reaction to what you had just read."
        • johnnyanmac 3y ago
          I'd assume that "good faith" would cover that aspect too. And I feel that's a comment issue more than a topic issue, so it's odd that HN punishes a post topic for a commenting issue.
  • carabiner 3y ago
    Yep this happened with my last 3 flagged submissions. All on social issues. Really sad because especially first one listed below I thought would elicit good discussions, somewhat tied other issues like affirmative action. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969
    • dang 3y ago
      I'd say https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 was an interesting submission that probably shouldn't have been flagged, although it's doubtful whether a thoughtful, curious discussion is possible. Usually we end up with people charging in and wielding their priors as a stick, and from that point of view I can understand the flags. The other two were too sensational and, in the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969, already a heavily discussed theme, so I'd say they were flagged correctly.
      • eduction 3y ago
        Your thinking on these and other posts is narrow minded and totally subservient to the richest people in Silicon Valley, starting with the people who own this site. You also have the temerity to go outside HN and tell people to rewrite posts on other sites - a corrosive form of censorship. Your reply here is a great example of why you are a poor moderator. I wish you would quit.
        • dang 3y ago
          > You also have the temerity to go outside HN and tell people to rewrite posts on other sites - a corrosive form of censorship I don't understand what you're referring to. Can you explain further? Edit: oh, I see - you're talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35719273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35719273. Yes, sometimes when startups ask me for help, I make suggestions about how they can change their articles to better appeal to HN readers, or to avoid pitfalls. For example, mentioning one's startup only at the end of an otherwise interesting article (which I guess people do because marketers told them it was a "call to action", or something?) makes many HN readers feel like the whole article was a bait-and-switch, and then they rush into comments to complain that the article is "just an ad" or whatnot. That's what happened in that thread - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718172 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718321. In such cases I advise authors to mention their startup right at the beginning - an easy fix. I don't think most people would call that censorship! - certainly the authors who take the advice do so freely and say they're grateful for it. I can't help but wonder if there's something else to your complaint because it's hard for me to understand why that would be objectionable. If you want to explain more I'd be interested... Btw re "the richest people in SV" - the startup in that case wasn't SV related as far as I know, and certainly not YC related; I believe it's a spinoff from Andy Pavlo's research group at CMU. I wasn't helping them for any reason other than to make the HN thread more interesting and because they emailed to ask.
  • neilv 3y ago
    > That said, the comments sections on these articles do tend to devolve pretty quickly. I might be getting desensitized, but (being pretty socially progressive, myself) the comment threads painful to me seem much less frequent today than a few years ago. (Up until a couple years ago, when a comment thread seemed to bring out comment threads that were very concerning, sometimes I'd go read a little n-gate.com, as an antidote. I'd let that person rant about HN, much more over-the-top than I would. Unfortunately, during their last installment or two, before disappearing, the writer sounded more genuinely upset about something. I hope they're OK, and that they didn't absorb too much stress, while saving me from blowing a gasket.)
    • kergonath 3y ago
      > I might be getting desensitized, but (being pretty socially progressive, myself) the comment threads painful to me seem much less frequent today than a few years ago. I think so as well. But I also think I’ve become better at spotting the emergence of sterile discussions where people just want to push each other’s buttons. I see them coming before they completely devolve, at which point a tap on the [-] button makes reading HN much less draining emotionally. I had to be at peace with the knowledge that I would not read any good post there, though, as I have a kind of completionist mindset and it is unnatural not to read everything.
    • igleria 3y ago
      > n-gate.com first time I saw this website. Lot's of laughs but yeah, the owner probably went to therapy or is no longer among us.
  • Mistletoe 3y ago
    Hacker News would be immeasurably improved by removing the flag button entirely. That’s what the downvote button is for. Flag should be a message to a mod if there is something heinous like gore on the front page. It’s used as a censorship button here and that isn’t cool, especially in a place that is supposed to support well rounded discussion.
    • mdp2021 3y ago
      The snipers that hit you prove you wrong: you may have looked for discussion, you received passing sneers: flagging is probably not the critical issue.
    • dotnet00 3y ago
      I disagree, the flag button is very valuable, especially whenever any other social media goes through some exodus and we get a bunch of new transient users who don't really care about the culture here. For example, since the reddit exodus, I feel like we've had an uptick in "drive-by" comments (characteristic of reddit) where people just throw in some sort of unproductive, sometimes provocative comment with no intent of engaging. Flagging is a nice way to clean up trash like that without having to pull in a moderator.
    • tptacek 3y ago
      That supposes that the only criteria for what should or shouldn't be promoted to HN users is the vote count. But HN has never worked that way, and never could; if it did, the front page would be all cat pictures.
      • idlewords 3y ago
        Where do I go to upvote that happening?
    • grecy 3y ago
      I agree 100%. Given that some of the most influential tech people on the planet frequent HN (see Matt Cutts, etc.), I think it's critically important to discuss topics that are related simply to making the world a better place. Tech and tech people can help , but not if we can't even have the conversations. If the richest and most influential people in tech are not even permitted to have these conversations, the chances of them getting fixed drops dramatically. It feels like YCombinator wants to just keep shoving heads into sand on many, many topics because they're making money, and making money is the goal.
  • version_five 3y ago
    That kind of stuff has infected so much of modern discourse, if people want to talk about it there are plenty of forums for it. Why should we all stop what we're doing and prioritize discussing a niche political cause who's proponents have been blackmailing people everywhere into paying attention to them and have now come to dominate all sorts of forums and secure power, ironically with no benefit to the people they feign support for. And when people say they want it discussed, they don't mean they want to read diverse opinions, they just mean they want to see orthodoxy regurgitated.
    • dang 3y ago
      Political threads often do go that way, and I understand the frustration. We don't want regurgitation—that follows from what we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... But the question of how to handle politics on HN is not simple. By the same principle of trying to optimize for curiosity, some content with political overlap is interesting and belongs here. The questions are which forms of it, how much, which particular links, etc.. I feel like after 10 years we arrived at a pretty coherent and stable general answer to that. Not that we get every specific call right—we don't. But the general principle has held up. For anyone wondering what I'm talking about, here are some past explanations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 (April 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 (Nov 2019) and some related points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679 (July 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 (May 2018) and there are lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... covering this.
      • SkyMarshal 3y ago
        @dang I hope you write a book someday on everything you've learned as the main mod of HN for the past decade or however long you've been doing it. It would be an absolute treasure trove of how to manage public forums and social media, especially as it evolves from a small niche community to a larger one, maintaining as much of its original character as possible, and in a highly politicized, adversarial, and mis/dis-info saturated information environment. Would be a fascinating read.
  • lackinnermind 3y ago
    Opinions and views likely follow statical patterns like everything else. Systemic reasons are why it's common to see the collective responsible for the systemic patterns in society be so fervent to deny systemic issues exist. I myself like the idea of my success being attributed to my hard work. I would like to think that I bootstrapped my way to success. It's not an easy feeling to accept that in many ways by virtue of just being part of the main majority collective I by default have an advantage in my community over those that aren't a member in that majority collective group. i.e. if the majority % of users in a forum are belonging to a certain category then it's reasonable to believe that most of that majority would be against anything perceived as a criticism of their group (and by extension themselves).
    • dmix 3y ago
      There's not a lack of these sorts of discussions on the internet by males or tech people or white people or whatever. Just go on Reddit or Twitter it's everywhere. American's love talking about those issues. It's probably the biggest thing they love talking about compared to most other countries.
  • ggm 3y ago
    There's substantial levels of denialism of there being any problem. It's odd to see both deflection, and abuse, where both systematically point to the underlying experiences validating the problems exist, and both attempting to "deny" it. As an old hand in ICT it wasn't always like this. Something happened (in my opinion) between about 84 and 94 which systematically eroded and undermined women's experience in ICT. I'd say it was gamer/pc culture but it's beyond that, although it's tied up in it. The conference cycles and tradeshows also played a role. Booth babes played a part, trivialising women's roles in public. Several dozen highly significant design, analysis and operational roles in the internet vested in women back "then". People sometimes forget that. Women have always been a part of systems, networks, code. Always.
    • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      It's that the profession acquired status and $$. Mid-90s into the .com boom transformed it from a nerdy but niche profession/obsession into one with status. Anytime that happens, the gatekeepers start to dominate. That's my guess, anyways. I got into this work for pay in the mid-90s, not earlier, so I'll take your word for it that there was a time when women were more prominent.
    • fsckboy 3y ago
      In the latter half of the '80s, MIT changed their admission criteria to get a larger percentage of women undergraduates in incoming classes. This cohort did not have the same level of "STEM advanced placement" prep classes as before and the grind/pace/atmosphere of the freshman filter classes changed; many faculty were not happy about it, as I was told by female students from that time period. I don't doubt that similar changes took place elsewhere. I'm not saying this was not an improvement, simply that it meshes with your timeline and sheds a different specturm of light on what you are pointing out. (to put it another way, there were traditionally many fewer women who wore pocket protectors and carried sliderules, but yes they were very much a part of the community)
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >Something happened (in my opinion) between about 84 and 94 which systematically eroded and undermined women's experience in ICT. you're pretty much on the money: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when... The reasons speculated are much more boring, though. The personal computer was treated no differently than a Nintendo console, AKA a toy. So they (big coporate) simply decided boys were easier to market the home PC to (remember, this was decades before the general public took games seriously. People legitmately thought video games were a fad to die out of) And that stuck. Snowballs into a time where the "nerd" stereotype more or less became the perogative term in the 80's/90's as a quick framing for some undesirable male. Every single piece of media had some stereotype of it, well into the 00's. It's not surprising women were put off. Men were put off too. No particular mastermind here. Just corporate wanting to make a quick buck off of kids. Those kids just happened to pioneer an entire industry while Hollywood laughed at them.
  • lvncelot 3y ago
    I just stend to stay clear of certain topics on HN. It's not that I'm not open to different viewpoints on the internet, it's that these comment sections are filled with bad-faith arguing and are just bound to make me angry. If I wanted that, I could just go to Reddit or Twitter.
    • uoaei 3y ago
      I know it's a complete impossibility, but some kind of "bad faith filter" would go a long way to making the comments much more pleasant. I'm not sure what I should expect from a community that prides itself on its rationalist roots, but discussions are often disappointing nonetheless.
      • johnnyanmac 3y ago
        You'd be surprise how much of this noise can disappear from blocking maybe, a dozen frequently "passionate" commenters in a community like this. But block features aren't on the table last I checked.
        • JNRowe 3y ago
          There was an extension¹ posted a few years ago² which implements blocking on the client side. The possible issue is there may be some users who you wish to block in the general case that do add value in other threads, so you would have to weigh up those decisions. However, it feels like a bad idea to me, if only because it reduces community building and curation a little. Without a mass of users taking action via flagging or reporting on community problems the end result will surely just tend towards submissions and comment threads that are simply garbage, as that is what new users would see as the social norms. All that said, I wouldn't blame people for using it. There do seem to be a few members of this community that I'd not want to know in real life, and given their comments in some threads they'd not want to know me either ;) Edit: I see you mentioned an extension in another thread, and this may be the same one. Still, I'll leave this here in case others want to see the links. ¹ https://github.com/morgante/hn_blocklist https://github.com/morgante/hn_blocklist ² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005699
  • matheusmoreira 3y ago
    I started submitting articles about brazilian politics to HN after I read a really nice thread about hiring in South America. Some of them have been flagged and still generated discussion somehow. I've learned to accept it. If they get deleted, I won't force the issue. It's true that political discussion tends to devolve quickly. This is especially true for a fifty-fifty polarized country like Brazil. I'm still glad this community has been relatively tolerant. I almost always enjoy the conversations I have here, even when I do not agree.
• thimkerbell 3y ago
  Thank you Dan.
• ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  Annual submission? Forever props to Dang and the mods of course. Some previous discussions: A year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374040 3 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048415 4 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052
  • 1000bestlives 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • dang 3y ago
      I think once a year is probably about right for a meta fest. Kind of like how carnivals are annual. There are 29 other things on the front page! If you want to complain about repetition, there are two Roman history articles on the front page right now. That's a lot. (Edit: never mind, one got cut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36914993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36914993.)
      • empathy_m 3y ago
        Is there a point at which the mods' work can be done by a large language model? Not because it's any cheaper or anything, just because after many years of doing this eventually it must start to feel stale and there's a burnout risk. Imagine if you leave almost all the work to automation and check in much less frequently. So much time for any other activities.
• hoofhearted 3y ago
  Daniel is the man! I can’t express how grateful I am for his openness and honesty when you interact with him. I’m working on a fun side project now that was inspired after emailing him. When YC asks me to come out for a demo, I’d be most excited to finally meet him in person lol
• noir_lord 3y ago
  That the moderators are so unnoticeable is a testament to their skill. We have to do heavy content moderation at work and the people requiring that moderation would test the patience of a literal saint.
  • Given_47 3y ago
    I especially love Dan aggregating previous discussions on <topic>. Equally appreciate the other users that do the same. It’s nice to go and check out how perceptions have changed (if it’s a thing with longer time horizon) or just additional discourse
  • DANmode 3y ago
    As if to prove this, the other day I saw some clown with a multi-year account chastising dang, as if he was a self-appointed moderator! Great work, mods.
  • chasd00 3y ago
    I agree, the fact that I haven't noticed significant moderation on HN is a sign of really good work by that team. Also, it's a sign of a community, while not perfect, is at least trying to be a community. I would like to read the moderators take on getting through the pandemic on HN. The toxicity here hit new highs for me during that period. God help you if even dared to muse that you may consider thinking about lockdowns as maybe not the perfect answer. Further, even whispering "lab-leak" is still a crime although not as punished as it once was. Even through that period though i will say HN is the best large-scale forum i've ever found.
  • kaycebasques 3y ago
    "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." https://youtu.be/edCqF_NtpOQ https://youtu.be/edCqF_NtpOQ
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      I sure wish work life worked like that. Instead they say "why are we paying you? Nothing is broken", and coincidentally stuff breaks weeks after being let go. I understand it for non-technical companies (even if by now, decades later, they should treat IT like they treat insurance... sigh), but it's baffling for a tech focused company to treat engineers like that.
• gerdesj 3y ago
  "I wondered if their work might show that tech really does need humanism—that better online communities can be built one relationship at a time. Then my eyes moved down the thread, where a third user had left a new comment. It read: “King Canute was supposed to stop the tide, you couch alluder.” Great article, very well researched. Ms Weiner has clearly put some major effort in there ... or spends an inordinate amount of time here anyway! Is HN on speed dial in her browser. The article is pre-pandemic and a lot of other recent events. I'd love to diff the older article with one written nowadays, ideally with minimal knowledge of the original.
  • dang 3y ago
    She did do a ton of research, worked through all the materials we sent her (I sent a lot, including a thwack of Kids in the Hall videos, several years-long email threads with specific users, with their permission of course, and god knows what else), and even changed her mind—a thing rare enough to always deserve respect. We took a risk in trusting her; I felt like it worked out, and I'm glad we chose to be open. The article came out fairer than we probably had any grounds to expect. There were bits I could complain about, but that's inevitable. I felt seen and I think Scott did too. Re Canute, she missed that pvg was being playful, in the context of a longstanding positive connection. I felt bad when I saw that. But we did get an amusing, and properly italicized, About box out of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pvg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pvg. Come back, pvg!
    • AviationAtom 3y ago
      How different do you think the article might have read had it been written two years later than it was?
      • dang 3y ago
        No clue.
• motohagiography 3y ago
  Forums, like music, love and friendship, die when the participants become meta about them, I think. Criticism is what we have when we aren't giving or participating, and while it opens conversations to people who don't have a stake in them, it also invites self centeredness and abuses for other agendas. Everything is better when we stop being meta.
  • dang 3y ago
    https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20crack%20meta&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20catnip%20&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
    • motohagiography 3y ago
      If we could get Ducksauce or the Kiffness to produce a song with a sample of everything is better when we stop being meta, we might just be able to save the world. :)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    > love and friendship, die when the participants become meta about them I am wondering how you make love "meta" in this example. Is it like a sitcom where they start pointing out each other's mistakes passive aggressively? But personally I don't fully agree. "meta" is simply another tool, and like any tool you need to know where and how to use it for the best effect. I'd say it's more like comedy: you need to consider the context to really nail it, and sometimes it simply isn't the right time to use the tool. But the agreeing part here is the general sentiment that people love to run a certain tool to the ground when it becomes trendy. See it all the time in media. trends come and go because companies treat these tools as gold rushes rather than ways to properly convey a message. Flanderization, in a nutshell.
  • 3y ago
• duckhelmet 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • tiffanyg 3y ago
    d. None of the above
    • duckhelmet 3y ago
      > d. None of the above e. Ok, what personal stuff would you want to talk about?
• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  I suggest we pool our resources and produce a Mexican corrido music video for dang.
• antigonemerlin 3y ago
  Trust only answers from domain experts. I think it is unreasonable to expect that hackers are expert assyriologists, material scientists, or sociologists, despite what we may think about ourselves. Some of us are fortunate enough to know many things and master a few more disciplines. Few of us have mastered everything. I know that I'm a glorified glue monkey. On all other subjects, I am ignorant, and rely on the opinions of others. After leaving reddit, I'm trying not to relapse into karma farming and speculating about topics which I have no expertise in, which just about leaves my own personal anecdotes about growing up Canadian. That, and asking the beginner's question. That's probably for the best for the health of the forum at large.
  • throwanem 3y ago
    Welcome to Hacker News, where you curate your experience mostly the old-fashioned way - in your brain. It doesn't always work out great, but no one ever promised it would. About three days in five, I look at the front page and shake my head. But the other two, it's worth more to me than any of the newspapers I actually pay for.
  • trentnix 3y ago
    Trust only answers from domain experts. And how does one discern who the domain experts are?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• yowlingcat 3y ago
  HN is one of the few communities where I've had scenarios where I've gotten into a spirited discussion, been gently told to cool off (or gotten a temporary rate limit), taken a step back and realized, you know what? I was not interacting in the spirit of the community. Of course, the community is no more immune than any other regarding group think or rough edges. But on the whole, I've found the level of discourse to impressively high quality over time, and I've been posting and reading here on one account or another for over a decade. It's not just the level of discourse that is impressive, but its prolonged longevity. I think it can only have occurred from a very thoughtful approach to moderation; something I immediately miss when I step into other less curated forums such as Reddit and Twitter, where I can find the interesting content in the discourse, but laden with significantly more noise and significantly less thoughtfulness. Thanks dang!
  • klabb3 3y ago
    Agreed. But this isn’t just the top-down moderation, no matter how much of demi-god dang is. My experience is that HN users “moderate” each other, when appropriate, to some degree. I’ve told others they’re over the line and I’ve been told myself, in a respectful manner. This tends to suppress fires early before they become flame wars. So I think while dang does excellent work, the fact that it’s transparent and most respect that, people voluntarily self-align and help out. Otoh, in places where mods are assholes or automated, people don’t care about the spirit of the rules at all.
    • lolinder 3y ago
      dang's biggest contribution is setting the example. You can see it in this very submission—his reactions to pretty severe criticism in the subthread above are universally calm and measured, even when the other party gets quite aggressive. And he's also quick to talk down people who think they're defending him and/or HN but are doing so in an aggressive way. He's the same way when he's moderating, and I've definitely patterned my own pseudo-moderating comments after what I've seen him do.
      • Sabinus 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Do you think that the recent problems at reddit could be a cause of division on HN? Maybe part of the exodus of reddit users are coming to HN? It seems like HN has become more political in just last couple months.
  • TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
    I'd be one of those. I've become disenchanted with Reddit, and found Mastodon unsatisfying, so for now I'm mostly here. This is ... often a strange and uncomfortable place for me to be. I'm geeky, and work in tech, and I tend left wing and have absolutely no interest in finance, and have a deep deep distrust of "tech bros" and startup culture. I've also found that I have a tendency to come across in online discussions as far more strident and argumentative than I really am, especially when I'm tired. That's something I'm working on.
    • orzig 3y ago
      I try to think of each top-level comment like a sales pitch to get me to respond. If it smells even slightly funny, I pass. The next opportunity is just a 'next' away.
    • kergonath 3y ago
      > This is ... often a strange and uncomfortable place for me to be. I'm geeky, and work in tech, and I tend left wing and have absolutely no interest in finance, and have a deep deep distrust of "tech bros" and startup culture. I can assure you, there’s plenty of you here. They just don’t comment on every subject.
  • dang 3y ago
    > It seems like HN has become more political in just last couple months. Users have been saying that almost since the beginning, but I think it's mostly just swings and fluctuations. Lots of past examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
  • dredmorbius 3y ago
    Classifying posts by the submitted site, "general news" has fallen from about 8% to 4% of all front-page stories, from 2009 to 2022. (2009 selected as the first couple of years of HN were still sorting things out, 2022 as the most recent complete year with data available.) Submissions specific to programming or software projects have arguably increased though that's in part as they're easier to determine based on github/gitlab URLs. For 2022 the sites-based classification is: 2022 Posts: 10,950 Sites: 1,158 Submitters: 1,397 Class Stories Votes (mean) Comments (mean) UNCLASSIFIED: 4838 1439100 297.46 766470 158.43 programming: 1146 308222 268.95 117139 102.22 blog: 1123 322989 287.61 202251 180.10 academic / science: 571 131810 230.84 74684 130.80 general news: 444 158965 358.03 154772 348.59 n/a: 432 167275 387.21 125304 290.06 corporate comm.: 408 145583 356.82 86243 211.38 tech news: 400 122049 305.12 92895 232.24 social media: 252 124105 492.48 87830 348.53 general interest: 222 53305 240.11 47007 211.74 business news: 167 58116 348.00 63474 380.08 government: 128 49602 387.52 37619 293.90 software: 122 37479 307.20 16820 137.87 technology: 113 26182 231.70 14264 126.23 video: 111 29189 262.96 14370 129.46 general info (wiki): 72 13318 184.97 6544 90.89 science news: 69 17118 248.09 10916 158.20 general discussion: 31 13035 420.48 8616 277.94 general info: 26 4436 170.62 3165 121.73 healthcare / medicine: 25 6915 276.60 4808 192.32 tech discussion: 20 6000 300.00 2757 137.85 tech support: 18 7912 439.56 4192 232.89 database: 17 5791 340.65 1878 110.47 web design: 17 4443 261.35 2728 160.47 cybersecurity: 16 3221 201.31 1635 102.19 literature: 14 1973 140.93 1316 94.00 entertainment news: 14 4687 334.79 3018 215.57 political commentary: 13 5522 424.77 5796 445.85 law: 11 5015 455.91 3350 304.55 health news: 11 2946 267.82 2400 218.18 cryptocurrency: 11 7013 637.55 7610 691.82 tech publications: 11 2415 219.55 1278 116.18 misc documents: 10 3422 342.20 2065 206.50 hardware: 7 1997 285.29 1185 169.29 mailing list: 7 2154 307.71 877 125.29 entertainment: 7 2382 340.29 738 105.43 sport / recreation: 7 2307 329.57 1793 256.14 political news: 6 2065 344.17 1697 282.83 military: 5 734 146.80 254 50.80 books: 4 701 175.25 310 77.50 images: 3 1255 418.33 579 193.00 journalism: 3 975 325.00 477 159.00 technology & society: 3 487 162.33 412 137.33 webcomic: 2 748 374.00 493 246.50 economics: 2 278 139.00 276 138.00 usability ui/ux: 2 344 172.00 306 153.00 business education: 2 364 182.00 204 102.00 social justice news: 2 552 276.00 602 301.00 outdoors / environment: 2 720 360.00 417 208.50 legal news: 1 333 333.00 191 191.00 crowdfunding: 1 339 339.00 114 114.00 organisations: 1 137 137.00 126 126.00 That's little different from either 2021 or 2023 to date. There is less focus on general news and more on programming-specific domains than in the first three years of Hacker News. I can give breakdowns on classifications if requested, but basically: - "programming" is typically a github/gitlab URL or language-specific domain (python.org, golang.org, etc.) - "blog" is either an identifiable blogging site or a site verified to be a blog. - "academic / science" is either an edu (or other cc-tld equivalent) domain, or a scientific publication (e.g., nature.com, stanford.edu, u-tokyo.ac.jp) - "general news" is a general-interest news site, (e.g., nytimes.com, wsj.com, washingtonpost.com) - "n/a" is a post without a URL, typically an "Ask ...", "Tell ...", "Who's hiring", or related post. - "corporate comm." is on a corporate domain about that corporation, e.g., apple.com, blog.mozilla.org) - "general interest" is usually a general-interest magazine, or other general-topic site (e.g., theatlantic.com, newyorker.com, archive.org) Etc. I've manually classified 16,185 "sites" (many thankfully by regex), of 52,642 total in the front-page archive, or about 30%, which cover ~= 65% of all HN front-page stories. "UNCLASSIFIED" tends strongly toward blogs and corporate sites based on some sampled selections. All sites with >= 17 front-page posts have been classified. The actual story topic may not correspond to the site classification. "general news" topics often concern tech-related businesses, technology, products, legislation, regulation, etc., though they may also relate to general news items, of course.
• dejongh 3y ago
  I swing by Hacker News almost daily. Thanks for all the links and comments.
• lapcat 3y ago
  I feel, as someone who has observed and participated in HN for years, that the moderation doesn't do much good. I mean, I'm sure that HN would be worse if there was no moderation, but there's simply not enough moderation to go around. One or two people can't handle the sheer volume of, well, shit on here. There's a lot of shit. The HN guidelines are violated multiple times in practically every comment thread. I find myself becoming my worst self on here, whether I want to or not, in reaction to others being their worst selves too. It's difficult to rise above the fray. Dang must have infinite patience, but I don't, and most people don't seem to either. Dang sets an example that few are willing to follow. I also feel that he gives people way too much lenience. It's like, "I see you've violated the guidelines badly multiple times lately. That's not cool. If you don't stop, then I might have to ban you, someday in the future, or maybe not. I'll give you one... hundred more chances." I'm exaggerating here, but only slightly. ;-) I know that some commenters think that HN is great place for intelligent, friendly discussion. I personally don't understand that. It's like we live in different worlds. But I'm certainly not alone in seeing HN as "toxic", something mentioned in the linked article, as well as by people I know elsewhere. I come here for the topics, which are often very interesting to me, yet all too often I come away from HN regretting my participation. Maybe this is just a bad habit that needs breaking. :-)
  • Infinitesimus 3y ago
    Reaching to just this part > I find myself becoming my worst self on here, whether I want to or not, in reaction to others being their worst selves too. It's difficult to rise above the fray. You always have a choice. If you display your worst self on here, you choose to do so. You can opt not to engage with comments that are a negative to the community.
    • lapcat 3y ago
      > You always have a choice. If you display your worst self on here, you choose to do so. You can opt not to engage with comments that are a negative to the community. Sigh. I would respectfully ask you to perform some self-reflection about this very reply of yours. I was admitting to a common, natural, human fallibility, and you chose to reply in a way that seemed blameful and condescending. "You always have a choice" is a cliché here in the HN comments. It's not an interesting response.
• dmvdoug 3y ago
  This is actually a very good article. It leans a little towards caricature (insofar as it takes the detached perspective on HN of people who seem not to inhabit HN regularly, and so seems more inclined to credit the criticisms), but not nearly as much as I was expecting it to. This was also a very accurate description: > Skipping from thread to thread felt a bit like arriving at a party where half the room was sipping non-alcoholic shrubs and the other half had spent the afternoon tailgating in a stadium parking lot. Reading N-Gate still cracks me up today. But the person behind it was a bit vicious in ascribing to all of HN the motives/aspirations of Y Combinator. His/her description of who inhabits HN seemed much more to the point when directed at YC instead.
• sacnoradhq 3y ago
  I dare you: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Gackle https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Gackle Spoiler alert: It assume you're looking for a loud, pushy corvid that hops up on your table and insists it has a right to one of your tacos.
  • dmvdoug 3y ago
    That’s a grackle (GRA-kl), dang is a Gackle (Gack-lee).
• gjvc 3y ago
  [dupe]
• ge96 3y ago
  It trims the bits or it gets the hose again
• mitchbob 3y ago
  https://archive.ph/V9z3G https://archive.ph/V9z3G
• zzzeek 3y ago
  > The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns. The message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own. Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of Yuval Noah Harari. wow nailed it
  • vacuity 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • avgcorrection 3y ago
    Oh yeah! If they last visited the site six years ago. In reality the contrarianism also leads to pushback against “libertarian economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of Yuval Noah Harari”, as well as the “hyperrational” style of argumentation, as well as the dullard technologists who don’t want to deal with “politics”. You will for sure regularly roll your eyes if you dislike the stereotypical HN comments. But you will also see all of them get a healthy amount of pushback. Topics are seldom an echo-chamber or a display of dueling Markov bots. Not any more.
    • zzzeek 3y ago
      damn straight! I come here to help deliver such pushback. because otherwise all the budding Sam Altmans here are going to plow through completely unaware that they might not be fully correct at all times or someone might disagree with them. Just like it was eye opening to see Star Trek episodes that revealed some people actually weren't cool with starfleet. "What? someone doesn't like crypto? someone doesn't like AI? mongodb isn't web scale?" all the same riff
• knighthack 3y ago
  "...whether the site’s original tech-intellectual culture can be responsibly scaled up to make space for a more inclusive, wider-ranging vision of technology." I don't come to Hacker News for "inclusive" technology - which these days appear to be a politically-correct euphemism for forced diversity. I come to Hacker News for discussions on technology. Anything that prioritizes the "inclusive" nature of technology, versus the "technology" itself, is irrelevant to me, and has nothing to do with the main interests of the site (hacking and technology) and should be downvoted. Keep politics and social politics out from Hacker News.
  • seoulbran 3y ago
    Amen
  • mschuster91 3y ago
    The thing is, technology alone without taking care about ethics and politics as well can be extremely dangerous for society itself. Just look at Facebook, with Zuckerberg's infamous "the dumb fucks trust me" quote from its early days and later on the scandals about Cambridge Analytica or its role in getting Trump elected. Or Whatsapp and the series of lynchings resulting from the new feature of forwarding messages, leading to fake news spreading faster than the old "chain letters". [1] https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
    • Y_Y 3y ago
      You make a strong point, but it's not clear to me that it addresses the concern of GP. That is to say, I find myself generally in agreement with your post and theirs and don't see a conflict, the clear harms you mention don't seem to me to result from insufficient "diversity" (in this particular sense).
      • mschuster91 3y ago
        > the clear harms you mention don't seem to me to result from insufficient "diversity" Of course they do. Simply put: a bunch of young, rich white Western men - they never experience the insane danger that are part of the daily life of women: men stalking them using every way they can, raping them, killing them, or doxxing them just because they can "for the lulz". Both do not experience the racism and discrimination Black people go through, and neither of these have the experience of people in the Balkans, India or other countries with ethnic and religious tensions. And that's just the tip of the iceberg - discrimination runs rampant across all our societies, with technology lessening the effects of some of it (e.g. AI-generated descriptions of images for the blind), and making others exponentially worse (especially online harassment). More diversity in anything tech automatically means more eyeballs on how a new (or existing) technology can be used by malicious actors to cause harm. For me the worst case in the last few years where this was clearly not done were AirTags - they are immensely useful, but it took over two years and uncountable reports of AirTags being used to facilitate crime of all kind to get a detection feature in Android [1]. [1] https://blog.google/products/android/unknown-tracker-alert-google-android/ https://blog.google/products/android/unknown-tracker-alert-g...
• TZubiri 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • psd1 3y ago
    Every community needs a subversive - or, at least, a clown.
• growingkittens 3y ago
  HN is still in the "everything non-male is political" stage of its development.
• picozeta 3y ago
  Because people might know that in that thread. How do I search for topics on HN that have > $n comments. I know it's possible, but I can't for the life of me remember how.
• JNRowe 3y ago
  Some time back I sent a "thank you for moderating" note, and about a minute after I hit send it dawned on me that the hn@ inbox was probably also collecting a few "I'm being silenced" mails at around the same time. It was that realisation that made me appreciate the moderators here all the more, as I'd give up about five times a day if faced with the task.
• LiamCooper234 3y ago
  [dead]
• gtsnexp 3y ago
  very interested in reading @dang 's general thoughts on this article