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?
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.
I have posted one or two outlandish things whilst enjoying a few too many drinks and I have been properly downvoted; I have never seen or heard of anyone being restricted/moderated inappropriately. Any specific examples that come to mind?
Edit, to add: I also say ridiculous things when sober, on occasion. I didn’t mean to imply that the only time my mighty brain falters is when I’m inebriated.
It’s the only recent comment of mine that went fairly negative, and free internet advocates are pretty militant. It’s not rocket science to make the inference.
Edit: it looks like that rate limit was put on your account several years ago. I didn't look up what was going on at the time, but I've taken it off now.
(In the future, I think we'll probably make penalties like this expire after a while - the problem is it's not so easy to tell which accounts are still breaking the site guidelines vs. which ones are fine, short of manual review, and we don't have much capacity for more manual review. In the meantime, anyone is welcome to ask what's going on with their account and we'll always take a look and answer; and when it seems safe to remove a penalty like this, we always do.)
with all due respect, this sort of response and tone is exactly why that kind of throttling exists:
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I commented in response because a comment downstream from what you linked felt much more caustic and may have been a bigger suspect than the first one. But by the nature of threaded comments, you will see less participation in a deeper comment. And I'm sure HN accounts for that. (-10 on a top level comment that was the first comment on the page may not be as bad as -1 on a deep comment).
If the repo is correct, these features are made to throttle comments that can cause flame wars. So, food for thought. A lot of times it's less about what you say and how you say it.
> with all due respect, this sort of response and tone is exactly why that kind of throttling exists:
> > don't cross-examine
Something about a mirror. Or: do you think you deserve aggressive throttling now?
Honestly, some of my comments might jive less with HN’s echo chamber, but that doesn’t mean they’re not based in fact, and it doesn’t make them inciting.
Edit:
I’m trying to practice taking complaints as actionable feedback, so
> So, food for thought. A lot of times it's less about what you say and how you say it.
I feel like this isn't getting through to you, but I wanted to at least try and reach out. Feedback is important, but I can't force people to take it to heart.
One more guideline to keep in mind:
>Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
going around calling the community you comment in an echo chamber in order to justify your views never changed anyone's minds. And insulting others as a group nor individual doesn't make your factual statements stronger to begin with. It's the same useless fluff you complain about. If your audience truly doesn't appreciate your views, you should seek one that does.
I was on the fence sending the last comment. But if the user is instead going to try and make it all about me.
, I wanted to send one last comment to try and emphasize the community aspect of how the rules work. I'm a bit neurodivergent, so I do want to assume good faith whenever someone feels like they can't understand the rules and needs an explicit pointing to what and why something is there.
But yes, we're doing the very thing the rules were meant to prevent, my apologies.
Likewise and I was in the wrong. I hate to beat a dead horse but look at my reply to a sibling comment in this comment thread for an example.
My honest opinion: I have geopolitical views that tend to upset ideological people which includes...coughpowerfulcough folks and got stuck with reputation accordingly (whatever, no complaints). I normally avoid politics because in the US at least, I am too contrarian and "centrist", but on HN people do engage and correct me or educate me when I am incorrect. At least it used to be so, times are achanging. But tech people keep being political so it's hard to avoid. One particular thread about signal or something, I made a point about Silicon Valley tech types presuming things and interfering with politics in other countries (something about signal or other apps enabling one side of politics to win over the other I think), I think that comment was the last straw before the restrictions (can't be sure though, just guessing), this must have been in 2022. But as the saying goes "if a cop tails a car for 500 miles, that car is getting a ticket!", I am sure I have done plenty more that violate the rules, my only complaint is on how my "punishment" was in secret with no opportunity to self-correct. Maybe like reddit, HN is best lurked?
I hope to see better times on HN and make dang's job easier on my part at least. happy 2024!
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.
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
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).
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.
I really wish there was some sort of open standard on fair moderation. Honestly, the parallels between bad managers and bad moderators is crazy. They both come down to poor communication and not understanding game theory stuff. Playing chess against a population playing checkers.
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.
'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.
Like a lot of non-mainstream forums, HN lives in a weird world, especially after the ban on political posting (here) and the rise of greater web content moderation (here and abroad) post 2015-2016.
With tech being a space that attracts everything from VC/finance/business people (usually a bit righter-wing), academics and journalists (usually more left) and hackers (who knows/free thinkers), I’m fairly surprised at the overall level of cohesion here.
One thing I’m more or less convinced of is that the tech world has changed a lot from the millennial era of “free thinker”ism and Obama-era liberal optimism. We now skew older, more conservative than 2009 (not necessarily right wing, but less “move fast and break things”), and, in some cases, more disillusioned with the trajectory of tech from a cool, nerdy backwater (pre dotcom boom) to a major cultural and economic engine.
As a side note, there are several good articles and documentaries that track cultural trends in HN, 4chan, reddit, and other online spaces in the transition from the wild-west to the walled garden. Will post links if I can dig them up.
Autism is not a disease. Nor is wearing an animal costume as a hobby.
Also, we probably shouldn't call it Aspergers, because naming something you are after the person the Nazis hired to decide whether or not you needed to be 'healed' of it[0][1] is kind of... really terrible? Like, I don't know how we let Hans Asperger get away with this shit.
> 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.
Can we stop labeling everyhing you disagree with or anyone who disagrees with your world view as "far right". By doing so, you are perpetuating a false dichotonmy when there is a diverse political spectrum. Also, leftists attack forums as well
I hate this idea that discussion on HN is inherently "better" or "more civilised" than in other forums. Some HN users will say the most outrageous things but with a superficial layer of "civility".
Parts of this site were a cesspool during the pandemic. No matter your position on it, discussion was of really low quality. Certain other emotionally charged topics (anything Apple, anything politics related, Elon Musk) also attract really bad discussion.
By and large, humans suck and aren't capable of reasonable debate when emotion runs high, and this place is no exception.
Nothing particularly wrong with saying "outrageous" things if that's what you personally believe. People should be able to just speak their minds in good faith without shame. If others don't like those ideas, oh well. They're not invalidated by being "outrageous".
Discussion here is certainly a lot better than many other places on the internet that will just straight up ban you if you post ideas the moderators consider wrongthink. Moderation here has been pretty fair. I don't generally see people getting censored here. Sometimes discussions get out of hand and dang asks people to stop reducing the quality of the site. That's absolutely fine and they're actually quite nice about it.
> Nothing particularly wrong with saying "outrageous" things if that's what you personally believe.
You can have that opinion, but I'll just point out that there's enough people who feel alienated if straight up racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, islamophobia or endorsement of terrorist organisations are tolerated. Maybe you feel that these people just shouldn't participate on this site, but I'd much rather the bigots didn't participate. Either way, it's a choice.
> Discussion here is certainly a lot better than many other places on the internet [...]
No, I disagree, it's just different. People are biased everywhere, it's just that HN users tend to have different biases than, say, certain subreddits.
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.
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.
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.
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?