6 ms·

Would like to mention Dang here, he is doing an extraordinary job in keeping this place sane and civilised. I really am wondering how he can read and react to

Would like to mention Dang here, he is doing an extraordinary job in keeping this place sane and civilised. I really am wondering how he can read and react to so many comments quickly. Dang, care to elaborate? Do you see a flat list of new comments, review them quickly? Do you use a moderation tool that scans the mood / tone / aggresiveness of a post? How do you do the screening and the replies? Manually?

core_dumped 3y ago
Dang is just a 10x moderator
- Zuiii 3y ago
  He's so good that I wouldn't be surprised if he was literally 10x moderators. Thank you dang (dangs?) for what you do.
  - jader201 3y ago
    Not sure if you were (half) joking, but in case you weren’t: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779139 (Spoiler alert: it’s all Dan G.)
- revskill 3y ago
  Even if you said 100x, he wont upvote you, hehe
_8j50 3y ago
I used to think so until the shadow restriction/moderation stuff. I must agree with the quality part though, just not the methods. But like reddit and other platform, the majority of users don't give a shit about this stuff until it's their turn. Oh well, shit is.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Grimburger 3y ago
  Show us some of the stuff you said so we can judge that ourselves? People can still see with Show Dead turned on, over the many years have never seen anything there that wasn't either inflammatory, spammy or otherwise very low quality.
  - _8j50 3y ago
    In my understanding, comments that need moderator intervention would be flagged, not just downvoted. Downvotes and flags are not what I talked about though, this might help with context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773957#38777787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773957#38777787 HN is the only site where I even comment publicly. No warning restrictions where you don't even know if you are restricted == shadow moderarion. Probably best I simply take a hint though, i should spend my time on more productive things anyways. Although, I really do enjoy healthy discourse with people who know the subjects in question far more than I do. HN should either have different rules for non-technical threads or avoid political/sensitive topics altogether imho. Moderation isn't easy, and I'm only being so critical because I am personally affected. Chances are this comment I spent time composing won't go through and I would have to abandon it because of the restrictions. An unfortunate side effect of it all is others like you can't see I am restricted. Or you would reply to me and I can't reply back because of those same restrictions. I hope we all can take a step back (especially myself) and and forge a new path where we trest others as we would like to be treated (can't ask for more).
    - yial 3y ago
      For what it’s worth, I can see your comment and reply. Though I realize that might not mean you can reply back.
  - jimbobthrowawy 3y ago
    I really wish other moderated sites had something like showdead. It's nice to see examples of what kind of content isn't meant to be on a site. (but isn't illegal and purged totlly) reveddit used to exist for reddit, but was killed during the API pricing debacle. A shame I need to create an account to use it though.
smeej 3y ago
I got to be one of the people who learned today that it's "Dan G," not [only] "dang."
- s3p 3y ago
  Grabbing my spot in history, same here.
kmeisthax 3y ago
I disagree slightly. Usually HN is fine, but there's a lot of weird shifts in site culture. Sometimes you'll see comments on political submissions slide way to the right and shit gets flagged. My tinfoil regarding this is that HN is getting freep'd[0] - a thread gets linked on a conservative or far-right forum and is either flag bombed or spammed with propaganda comments. As mentioned in the "implicit downrank of DEI" section, the moderators try to unflag these threads (since they're relevant and people want to talk about them) but they just get flagged by the community a second time. If I had access to a better moderated community not being actively attacked by the far right, I'd use it. But I'm not aware of any[1]. [0] Short for "Free Republic" - a conservative political forum that would ballot stuff online polls for the sake of pushing their political agenda. [1] Note that I stopped posting to Reddit after /u/Spez decided to powertrip to kill a mod protest over third-party API clients.
- sph 3y ago
  > shit gets flagged. My tinfoil regarding this is that HN is getting freep'd[0] - a thread gets linked on a conservative or far-right forum and is either flag bombed or spammed with propaganda comments. With less aluminium foil: HN has an crude anti-flamewar system that roughly triggers when the ratio comments/upvotes is greater than 1, and the post is quickly deranked. Often this means it is a controversial post, but I've seen it happen with two or three posts/Ask HN of mine where a vibrant discussion causes them to disappear from the frontpage after 1 hour because commenters were too active and triggered the anti-flamewar system, which is quite disappointing. Please, not everything on the Internet revolves around your political issues. But if it were the case of a thread linked elsewhere and flooded, this system would trigger as well.
- pests 3y ago
  I have never once thought of this place as getting attacked by the far right.
  - foldr 3y ago
    'Attacked' is a bit subjective, but there are certainly trigger topics that attract large numbers of strongly right-leaning posters. I won't list these topics as they are basically exactly the 'culture wars' topics that you'd expect. I do personally find HN quite uncomfortable when discussion strays into social issues. I obviously don't feel that unwelcome here as I've been here since 2009. But there is a lot of bottled-up hostility to certain groups of people that can be released when the discussion takes a certain turn. And my subjective perception is that this has got much worse over the past decade. Extremist comments usually get flagged eventually, but lots of people have already read them by the time that happens, and you can post outrageous things here without actually getting your account banned. It's galling to be a member of group X, see an unambiguously hateful comment about group X, and then see this same account continuing to post for years afterwards.
Garvi 3y ago
People thanking the censor and exposing their defense mechanisms is quite the dystopian sight. I guess I must be one of those paid instigators and every positive feedback I receive is from people I personally brought in from the outside. This whole thread could be full of people expressing their dissatisfaction with the way HN is being moderated and most would never know. At least everyone is safe from a healthy debate on important subjects like an objective comparison of the US health care system with comparable systems the moderators censored last week. I have no more intentions of participating in this toxic community. It's pretty evident everyone with a brain left already.
- regularjack 3y ago
  Moderation != Censorship. Any online community without moderation is doomed. By now we have decades of proof for this, so I'm baffled that people still don't understand it.
  - deafpolygon 3y ago
    agreed. go to 4chan/8chan if you want to see no moderation.
  - Garvi 3y ago
    Another example of a defense mechanism: The strawman falacy. In other terms: That guy that said all moderation is bad - you sure showed him. Somehow all the disinformation that gets posted on US economic rivals gets unmoderated, while all the shit that's going on in the US or is committed by it's military (or it's sibling the Israeli military) remain completely undebated. There is literally no forum to discuss the wrongdoings of the US in Iraq that lead to the war in the first place and cost over a million people their lives. Have fun repeating your mistakes over and over and sending your children to die and kill other children. And you morons hate the Chinese and Russians more with every day and for all the propaganda that gets posted on this forum. I can understand now how the doctors must have felt during corona, with all the idiots telling them corona isn't real or dangerous, because they read a headline on reddit/9gag/HN.
    - 3y ago

core_dumped 3y ago

Dang is just a 10x moderator

Zuiii 3y ago
He's so good that I wouldn't be surprised if he was literally 10x moderators. Thank you dang (dangs?) for what you do.
- jader201 3y ago
  Not sure if you were (half) joking, but in case you weren’t: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779139 (Spoiler alert: it’s all Dan G.)
revskill 3y ago
Even if you said 100x, he wont upvote you, hehe

_8j50 3y ago

I used to think so until the shadow restriction/moderation stuff. I must agree with the quality part though, just not the methods. But like reddit and other platform, the majority of users don't give a shit about this stuff until it's their turn. Oh well, shit is.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Grimburger 3y ago
Show us some of the stuff you said so we can judge that ourselves? People can still see with Show Dead turned on, over the many years have never seen anything there that wasn't either inflammatory, spammy or otherwise very low quality.
- _8j50 3y ago
  In my understanding, comments that need moderator intervention would be flagged, not just downvoted. Downvotes and flags are not what I talked about though, this might help with context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773957#38777787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773957#38777787 HN is the only site where I even comment publicly. No warning restrictions where you don't even know if you are restricted == shadow moderarion. Probably best I simply take a hint though, i should spend my time on more productive things anyways. Although, I really do enjoy healthy discourse with people who know the subjects in question far more than I do. HN should either have different rules for non-technical threads or avoid political/sensitive topics altogether imho. Moderation isn't easy, and I'm only being so critical because I am personally affected. Chances are this comment I spent time composing won't go through and I would have to abandon it because of the restrictions. An unfortunate side effect of it all is others like you can't see I am restricted. Or you would reply to me and I can't reply back because of those same restrictions. I hope we all can take a step back (especially myself) and and forge a new path where we trest others as we would like to be treated (can't ask for more).
  - yial 3y ago
    For what it’s worth, I can see your comment and reply. Though I realize that might not mean you can reply back.
- jimbobthrowawy 3y ago
  I really wish other moderated sites had something like showdead. It's nice to see examples of what kind of content isn't meant to be on a site. (but isn't illegal and purged totlly) reveddit used to exist for reddit, but was killed during the API pricing debacle. A shame I need to create an account to use it though.

smeej 3y ago

I got to be one of the people who learned today that it's "Dan G," not [only] "dang."

s3p 3y ago
Grabbing my spot in history, same here.

kmeisthax 3y ago

I disagree slightly. Usually HN is fine, but there's a lot of weird shifts in site culture. Sometimes you'll see comments on political submissions slide way to the right and shit gets flagged. My tinfoil regarding this is that HN is getting freep'd[0] - a thread gets linked on a conservative or far-right forum and is either flag bombed or spammed with propaganda comments. As mentioned in the "implicit downrank of DEI" section, the moderators try to unflag these threads (since they're relevant and people want to talk about them) but they just get flagged by the community a second time. If I had access to a better moderated community not being actively attacked by the far right, I'd use it. But I'm not aware of any[1]. [0] Short for "Free Republic" - a conservative political forum that would ballot stuff online polls for the sake of pushing their political agenda. [1] Note that I stopped posting to Reddit after /u/Spez decided to powertrip to kill a mod protest over third-party API clients.

sph 3y ago
> shit gets flagged. My tinfoil regarding this is that HN is getting freep'd[0] - a thread gets linked on a conservative or far-right forum and is either flag bombed or spammed with propaganda comments. With less aluminium foil: HN has an crude anti-flamewar system that roughly triggers when the ratio comments/upvotes is greater than 1, and the post is quickly deranked. Often this means it is a controversial post, but I've seen it happen with two or three posts/Ask HN of mine where a vibrant discussion causes them to disappear from the frontpage after 1 hour because commenters were too active and triggered the anti-flamewar system, which is quite disappointing. Please, not everything on the Internet revolves around your political issues. But if it were the case of a thread linked elsewhere and flooded, this system would trigger as well.
pests 3y ago
I have never once thought of this place as getting attacked by the far right.
- foldr 3y ago
  'Attacked' is a bit subjective, but there are certainly trigger topics that attract large numbers of strongly right-leaning posters. I won't list these topics as they are basically exactly the 'culture wars' topics that you'd expect. I do personally find HN quite uncomfortable when discussion strays into social issues. I obviously don't feel that unwelcome here as I've been here since 2009. But there is a lot of bottled-up hostility to certain groups of people that can be released when the discussion takes a certain turn. And my subjective perception is that this has got much worse over the past decade. Extremist comments usually get flagged eventually, but lots of people have already read them by the time that happens, and you can post outrageous things here without actually getting your account banned. It's galling to be a member of group X, see an unambiguously hateful comment about group X, and then see this same account continuing to post for years afterwards.

Garvi 3y ago

People thanking the censor and exposing their defense mechanisms is quite the dystopian sight. I guess I must be one of those paid instigators and every positive feedback I receive is from people I personally brought in from the outside. This whole thread could be full of people expressing their dissatisfaction with the way HN is being moderated and most would never know. At least everyone is safe from a healthy debate on important subjects like an objective comparison of the US health care system with comparable systems the moderators censored last week. I have no more intentions of participating in this toxic community. It's pretty evident everyone with a brain left already.

regularjack 3y ago
Moderation != Censorship. Any online community without moderation is doomed. By now we have decades of proof for this, so I'm baffled that people still don't understand it.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  agreed. go to 4chan/8chan if you want to see no moderation.
- Garvi 3y ago
  Another example of a defense mechanism: The strawman falacy. In other terms: That guy that said all moderation is bad - you sure showed him. Somehow all the disinformation that gets posted on US economic rivals gets unmoderated, while all the shit that's going on in the US or is committed by it's military (or it's sibling the Israeli military) remain completely undebated. There is literally no forum to discuss the wrongdoings of the US in Iraq that lead to the war in the first place and cost over a million people their lives. Have fun repeating your mistakes over and over and sending your children to die and kill other children. And you morons hate the Chinese and Russians more with every day and for all the propaganda that gets posted on this forum. I can understand now how the doctors must have felt during corona, with all the idiots telling them corona isn't real or dangerous, because they read a headline on reddit/9gag/HN.
  - 3y ago