8 ms·

While you are there, go through dang’s comments timeline https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang Moderating s

• solardev 3y ago
  Yeah. In 30 years of being on the Internet, dang is probably the single best moderator I've ever met. Thank you SO much for what you do. We should all get together and throw him a virtual party...
  • pknerd 3y ago
    does SO means Stackoverflow here? kidding
• bowsamic 3y ago
  I understand why but I don’t like how people are individually rate limited silently without their knowledge. It is certainly immoral EDIT: unfortunately I cannot defend my point in the comments, as I am now rate limited :) EDIT 2: /u/Dylan16807 yes I'm seeing that. When I try and post it says "you are posting too quickly, please slow down"
  • whimsicalism 3y ago
    When I was rate-limited, I found it quite easy to find out what happened after a little bit of googling and get it reversed with a nicely worded email. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why you can't really post after a reply from dang. Nonetheless, I agree they could be a bit more explicit about this.
    • bowsamic 3y ago
      > It doesn't take a genius to figure out why you can't really post after a reply from dang. Well actually it does because you're wrong about this, it isn't about him replying to you, he manually sets a flag on your account.
      • whimsicalism 3y ago
        > Well actually it does because you're wrong about this, it isn't about him replying to you, he manually sets a flag on your account. Right, but in my experience, this usually occurs after a reply.
        • bowsamic 3y ago
          You said it doesn't take a genius to work it out but you haven't worked it out. It's opaque other than that we know it's a flag that can be manually set on the user without their knowledge
          • whimsicalism 3y ago
            I worked out that I had been flagged. I was not saying that dang replying was the mechanism, you are just (intentionally?) misinterpreting what I am saying. That dang replies to you is an indicator that he has flagged you. Not going to keep replying, as I suspect that a conversation between two people flagged in this manner is one of the likeliest to turn flame-y :)
        • krapp 3y ago
          Unfortunately, that reply can sometimes be days, weeks or who knows how old, and HN doesn't inform you of replies to your comments, so unless you happen to see it when it happens you're stuck with having to intuit that "you're replying too fast" is an extremely passive aggressive flag on your account and not just a general site-wide rate limiter. Or notice that your flags no longer work, or your vouches no longer work, or any number of even more subtle effects.
          • dabluecaboose 3y ago
            >Or notice that your flags no longer work, or your vouches no longer work, or any number of even more subtle effects. Wait, I'm now wondering if I've been limited. I've never once seen the "Vouch" button and I've flagged some blatant stuff that nothing happened to, but figured there was somewhat of a vote (or multiple flags) before it took any effect. Can anyone confirm this behavior?
  • sneak 3y ago
    I don't think it's immoral - it's their site, after all. Our being able to post here at all is a privilege afforded to us, and their choosing to revoke that privilege for any reason is fully within their rights. No cause or explanation is even required, though they are frequently provided out of the abundant courtesy that the moderators seem to have a natural talent for. If you think about it, even rate limiting is a slightly more courteous alternative to outright banning someone. I think shadowbanning is a bit unethical as it technically involves lying, but afaik HN doesn't do such things.
    • bowsamic 3y ago
      > I don't think it's immoral - it's their site, after all. > I think shadowbanning is a bit unethical as it technically involves lying These two points contradict, and also HN does do shadowbanning ("marking as dead")
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • pb7 3y ago
      >I think shadowbanning is a bit unethical as it technically involves lying, but afaik HN doesn't do such things. It does. A ban on HN is a shadowban. You can still post but only those who have "show dead" on will see it (greyed out and marked dead).
      • dang 3y ago
        Shadowbanning is when you don't tell the user that they're banned. When an account has an established history on HN, we tell them we're banning them and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22banned%20this%20account%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Shadowbanning is something we only do for either (1) spammers or (2) new accounts that are showing signs of being repeat abusers. This seems to be roughly the correct tradeoff.
  • Tao3300 3y ago
    > immoral That's really not the word you're looking for.
    • Vicinity9635 3y ago
      [dead]
    • bowsamic 3y ago
      How is it not? I think it’s wrong, ie immoral
  • shadowgovt 3y ago
    What principal of morality does rate-limiting a commenter on one's site violate?
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      I don't have a problem with it, but it's obviously (for the person you're replying to) the secrecy.
      • shadowgovt 3y ago
        Thank you; that makes sense. I can see that viewpoint, but I'm torn on whether I agree with it. On the one hand, it's at the very least considered good UX to inform users of information regarding their account status that impacts their experience. On the other hand, it's probably acceptable for a place called "Hacker News" to hide some community features behind "You have to demonstrate some willingness to do some computer sleuthing to learn this detail."
    • bowsamic 3y ago
      Honesty
  • Dylan16807 3y ago
    > EDIT: unfortunately I cannot defend my point in the comments, as I am now rate limited :) All comments get rate limited as they start to nest, by hiding the reply link. Are you seeing that?
    • shadowgovt 3y ago
      There's also an (account-specific) "You're posting too quickly. Please Slow Down. Thanks" that specific users get if they have a flag set on their account.
      • bitcharmer 3y ago
        So it's just for specific users that are manually targeted by dang? With zero transparency and accountability I'd say it's pretty awful.
        • shadowgovt 3y ago
          It's for specific users that the moderator of the site has decided could stand to have their bandwidth throttled to improve the site for everyone. I don't see anything awful about it; the accountability is whether we keep showing up to use the site. Regarding transparency, dang generally comments on a thread when they need a community member to review the rules and obey them, and the rules are public.
          • bitcharmer 3y ago
            Nope, I got throttled and never learned why. It's dang's empire here.
            • shadowgovt 3y ago
              If I were to hazard a guess, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35921579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35921579 If it bothers you that you can't figure out precisely why you were throttled, an email to the admins expressing a desire for UI around that might not be unwelcome.
  • LordDragonfang 3y ago
    As someone who personally has been rate-limited, it's a little annoying but justified in basically every occasion I've seen someone complain about it. It's also not hard to figure out what's happening if you're the kind of person willing to put in enough effort to be a good member of the hacker community. Avoid getting into flame wars, and send an email to dang saying you'll do so in the future, and you're fine. If you can't do that, or can't be bothered to use Google to figure that out, there's a good reason for your account to be rate limited.
    • mistermann 3y ago
      One problem is that many so-called flame wars are differences over one or more points of contention - resolving these is often a subjective matter, so for dang to perform that task fairly (disciplining one individual among two/many), it would require him to be an unbiased, perfectly rational human being. I am not demanding this of him of course, but this sort of level of finer details seem to not get discussed in the many threads like this that I've read.
      • shadowgovt 3y ago
        It's worth noting in general that on the topic of moderating a public forum, one of the constraints is the bandwidth of the moderators. I remember when EA ran into trouble because they attempted to build an AI model to auto moderate conversations in game chat. Their model failed when they trird to take the model built in one game and apply it to another game where the context involved a lot more discussion of Nazis. But the reasoning was sound: the inputs they used to train the model were the probability that a given sequence of conversation would result in the need to use human moderation intervention. They wanted to do less of that, so they trained a model to see it coming. Similarly, the bandwidth limiting on Hacker News diminishes moderation workload, because nobody has to moderate a comment never posted. And I don't doubt the site has enough signal to make an educated guess that posts going rapidly in a short burst of time is a good low resolution flamewar signal. Too many words to say the post limiter throttle is one of the things that keeps the site free to use.
  • lazyasciiart 3y ago
    That was done to me as well. I still have no idea why and when I finally got it lifted dang didn't know why either. One of the most infuriating experiences I've had in a forum, and actively made worse by the sycophantic adoring articles going around at the time citing their "personal human touch". dang explained that they can't possibly have time to give everyone that personal human touch! But not to the reporters, apparently.
    • tptacek 3y ago
      Have you considered asking for a refund?
      • bowsamic 3y ago
        HN is free. If you paid for it, you have been scammed
        • lazyasciiart 3y ago
          He knows that. I suspect he is implying that I have nothing to complain about because it is a free service, which is a pretty vacuous argument.
          • tptacek 3y ago
            It's a response to your expectation of personalized service.
            • lazyasciiart 3y ago
              My expectation is that he describes his level of personalized service the same way in private emails as in public comments. If you find that expectation overly haughty, well, you know where the refund button is.
            • bowsamic 3y ago
              I think you need to take a basic class in ethics if you think ethics are determined entirely by rights and law
• xwdv 3y ago
  I’ve had a few run-ins with dang. Every post I write nowadays I have to reread carefully to soften any sharp edges and avoid getting into trouble, but I don’t always have time to double check a comment if I’m in a hurry. I wonder if there is a hidden reputation score or if it’s all just based off of dang’s memory. Public karma scores are mostly useless except as a vanity metric.
• chrisan 3y ago
  no pun intended.. but dang, I had no idea
• zerojames 3y ago
  Yes indeed! Dan, we sincerely appreciate the work you do nurture, moderate, and maintain the HN community!
• dontupvoteme 3y ago
  Would be cool to see how a SOTA summary from an LLM of this looks like.