I'd like to think that more than a few people grasp this. He's some kind of machine - in the best, complimentary way. His replies to emails are succinct, helpful, educational, and still personable. No idea how he retains his equanimity across hundreds/thousands of interactions, mostly with strangers. IMO it's a worthwhile lesson (and a free one) to peruse his comment history:
I honestly wonder sometimes how it’s physically possible to do what dang does, it seems like such an enormous and Sisyphean task. Sad to see twitter replies complaining about the moderation, because if it wasn’t for the moderation the quality here would be much lower, the moderation is the whole reason those people are attracted to participating here. Respect and many thanks indeed.
As someone that moderated a … pithy … community site, I am all too familiar with that type of complaint.
I would regularly get called a “nazi,” because I would step into catfights, and break them up, or “nip them in the bud.” Once you’ve been doing it a while, you learn to smell trouble brewing, and it can escalate rapidly.
Many folks chafe at restrictions, and they may actually be correct. They, themselves, may be entirely trustworthy; but others may not.
Generally, we’re all for rules and structure, as long as they apply to others (especially those with whom we disagree), but they shouldn’t apply to us.
I participate in HN, quite a bit. I basically avoid all other social media.
A big reason is the decorum, here. If it dissolves, then I will no longer participate.
I’ve been “danged” a few times. In some cases, I felt that it was not what I considered “reasonable,” but I accept the slaps anyway.
When in an Italian city, wear a bedsheet, and all that…
> Many folks chafe at restrictions, and they may actually be correct.
We're at least a couple decades beyond the point where a reasonable person could possibly entertain such a thought. Lack of restrictions always turns communities into cesspools. They don't necessarily die, but the people that hang out there are the ones that enjoy spending time in cesspools, and that's usually different from the vision the creator of the site had in mind.
There is however a big difference in the legitimacy of restrictions. The reality is that their are many unreasonable people on the Internet. Most unreasonable people however think of themselves as reasonable and other similarly unreasonable people as reasonable as well. There are also some reasonable people on the Internet. So how do you know which one you are?
When we can't assume one or the other we have to look at something else where we might reach a conclusion. If someone says they are oppressed we can look at what would hinder their oppression. Arguably this would be things like transparency, participation and equality. As those things make oppression harder.
So if someone says they are being silenced a reasonable person might look if there are multiple known moderators who can check each other, a moderation log to see how moderation is happening or some voting system to reflect the opinions of the community.
In most cases where people are says they are being silenced these things doesn't exist. As such it would be unreasonable to dismiss their opinion as there seems to be an argument for the restrictions not being legitimate. Otherwise you just create a different cesspool of unreasonable people.
It would basically be impossible for a site like HN to silence anyone. There are many other highly-visible places to break news even if dang wants to cover something up. It's not remotely the same as if the government were to impose restrictions on speech.
I don't think it is impossible. If I did I wouldn't have made the argument I did. I also didn't say anything about the government. The same situation applies to for example a company. A company that wants to find out how things are going is going to insist in multiple interests in important meetings, documentation on decisions taken and things like employee surveys.
Presumably you disagree, but then you disagree with the far majority of well regarded implementations in the real world. I am about to buy an apartment and it is the same thing. You need a witness, a contract and approval from the housing organization. Because that how you reasonably decide what happened.
And yes, people break the news all the time. For example on Twitter on this very post. That is the point. When they do how do you know who is reasonable? Which is what I have argued.
I only recall getting danged once and it was spot-on. I wasn’t acting like a full on flaming ass, but there was at least a glowing ember there and he phrased his response in a way that made it easy to accept.
One of the moderation techniques I don’t really understand is the “We detached this subthread” move. I don’t know what it accomplishes, besides narrowly targeting a (sometimes highly-upvoted) subcomment to specifically bury it. It’s harsher than even flagging because it nukes the whole subthread full of replies, too. Often no explanation. Just “We detached this subthread from [url]” and that’s that. Seems like something you'd only want to do to the most heinous of posts.
I recall having a +80 upvote or so reply “detached” in this way, but can’t find the link.
In all 3 cases, the original parent was a massive subthread, probably at the top of the page. When child threads develop under top-heavy subthreads and cause discussion to drift in a generic direction, away from the original topic, that's a problem for thread quality. This is one of the most common times when we detach subthreads. All 3 examples look like classic cases to me.
Moderating top subthreads in this and other ways is probably the single biggest thing that moderators do here to promote thread quality. It makes a huge difference. We've learned a lot about this in the last few years.
By the way, none of this is necessarily a problem with the detached comment, nor does it imply anything bad about your (i.e. the child commenter's) intent. Often the child comment has been posted for exactly the right reason—thoughtful conversation. But if it takes a step away from the original topic in a generic direction, or a flameprone direction, upvotes and replies often start pouring in, skewing the thread as a whole in a way that makes it less interesting.
In other words, this is not just the fault of the child commenter (and maybe not at all). It's a co-creation along with all the other repliers and upvoters.
The more we learn, the clearer it gets that we need to moderate not specific posts, but subthreads. Subthreads are the unit of HN comment moderation. (Edit: doesn't that mean—someone will ask—that you could maliciously derail/destroy a subthread by adding bad comments to it? No, because we can detach those. That's case (2) in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27132402.)
Wow, thanks for taking the time to make that massive reply. This kind of Inside Baseball is facinating and really helps to take the mystery out of what goes on here. Surprised that this "tree balancing" really makes much of a difference.
EDIT: I wonder if trolls deliberately wait for and then target top main-threads, in order to maximize the blast radius of their trolling.
Lots of people do this without necessarily being trolls because they feel their comment would be lost, especially if some giant topcomment is dominating the discussion.
People also do the opposite - writing a toplevel comment to discuss (berate, more often than not) multiple other comments - 'I can't believe the nattering nabobs of negativism that have been commenting here, etc'.
In both cases, writing a good, non-repetitive, non-meta toplevel comment is probably better but it's more work and potentially unsatisfying - a lot of the time, a comment like that will in fact be lost in a big discussion.
As I've responded elsewhere in this subthread, a good top-level post can often succeed in gathering enough votes / mod attention to float up.
Probably not on the busiest posts (though those are something of a conversational lost cause already), but on most typical discussions without excessive comments, yes.
Searching for "by:dang <typical moderation phrase>" is a handy way for seeing what actions are taken, in what circumstances, and why.
I'll admit to tailing dang's comments periodically, or searching for specific terms when people challenge / inquire about my own takes on comments. (Most often in the case of dupe / non-dupe article submissions, occasionally others.)
Initial conditions, both over the lifetime of a post, and of a reader's encounter with a post, both have a huge impact on discussion direction. Much of HN's moderation seems to operate with this in mind.
Clickbait titles are de-baited. Indirect links are disintermediated. Divergent distracting comments are downweighted.
Much of my own interaction with the HN mod team (ask dang, I email fairly frequently, probably a few times a week) are with regard to link or title issues.
I'll also occasionally try to steer a discussion back on track with a top-level comment I hope more directly addresses the post than many early takes do. This isn't always successful, but I've been surprised several times where my own late-in-the discussion comment ends up highly-placed in the thread. One key is to really fight back against expressing frustration (the comments are usually born from an excess of that), and just lay out a strong case for an alternative take on what seems significant.
I actually did express that frustration out loud in this thread ... and dang commented on the initial-conditions aspect:
On an older account I once had a factual comment detached whilst the other person his comment (which pretty much stated the polar opposite) stayed under the main post. Looking at which other comments stayed or got detached it was quite easy to see an enormous bias. Pointing that out, all I got was a vague “I understand you are passionate”. I think that’s the only time I’ve ever seen him miss his stride, though.
I run an online community, with my own developed software. We use lots of different tools to prevent spam, harassment, etc. We use different APIS to check IP, ASN, email for previous spam behaviour, use of disposable email domains, etc.
We have a team of moderators and as mentioned before you can "smell" something brewing. The words, to whom they are directed, etc.
A couple of years ago we started using Perspective API [0], a Google service
"Using machine learning to reduce toxicity online". We use the toxicity model, trained by Google and The NY Times. Basically we submit the text of posts and replies and receive a score. We do some account history calculations and if it's past a certain threshold then moderators receive a notification - we can't read all posts in our platform all the time but this helps a lot.
The community itself helps too, and the reporting tool is used when things happen that we aren't aware.
There are a lot of projects out there that are attempting to do this because of the impracticability of a human team to deal with the entire torrent of information.
> As part of a larger effort to combat disruptive behavior, Riot Games recently updated its Privacy Notice and Terms of Service to allow us to record and evaluate in-game voice communications when a report for that type of behavior is submitted—with the goal of kicking this off in VALORANT first.
I believe it would be quite possible. Text is a bit dryer to work with but has the advantage of being all text.
I wonder if this is a sign that they need more moderators. Given how much moderation is done by the community, I'm surprised dang needs to work as hard as he seems to.
To my knowledge, there is a combination of specific views on the site that highlight important features of the site (an obvious example might be the list of flagged comments; a less-obvious example might be https://news.ycombinator.com/topcomments which shows the top-most comment of each front page item) as well as email alerts from a variety of sources, some of those being user-driven.
You can just click the 'threads' link at the top left and it'll show you your comments and nested replies.
I had no idea about this until someone mentioned it. Prior to that I couldn't be bothered very often to check my comments for replies. It was too many steps and made me feel narcissistic for doing all that just to see.
I like to think he's some kind of monk, a zen master of human forums, and a genuinely good person. At least any exchange I had with him or observed with all kinds of people have been full of humanity, while firm in his mission. I don't know how he does it, and I wish we'd celebrate him and people like him far more.
I posted a link elsewhere in this thread to this article [1] - The lonely work of moderating Hacker News (2019) - and you might like its author's insights/views, plus there are plentiful quotes from Dang and his colleague, Scott Bell. [edit to add: a comment in reply to this says that Scott no longer works at HN. Surely Dang can't be doing this solo nowadays?]
Thanks for this. It makes me hopeful that we can find people and a process to keep things civil and somehow engaging in such a forum.
Sure HN has its pains (and I'm an unconditional of the late n-gate site) but they don't come from moderation shenanigans.
I also appreciate the pedagogy I often see. Some participants here have never been actively moderated and dang takes the time to explain as if the moderated person was one of the 10000 of the day.
I get a very different sense from the reading of his comments to users; curt and inconsiderate. He tends to make declarations about behavior that sound objective but are really just his very casual read of a situation, and there’s no appeal or redress possible.
Additionally, he tends to favor the original aggressor, ignoring the concept of instigation to fix the proximate cause of the negative interactions here. Don’t get caught punching second, in other words.
It’s classic utilitarianism; if 1% of users get shat upon by dang, and 99% in any way benefit from his negative behavior, I suppose the folks here would be alright with that?
> Additionally, he tends to favor the original aggressor, ignoring the concept of instigation to fix the proximate cause of the negative interactions here. Don’t get caught punching second, in other words.
Can you give an example? I just went through dang's comments in the last few days and found nothing of the sort, and it has not been my experience at all, unless posting an unpopular opinion counts as instigation. Dang's pattern, every time I've been witness to his moderation, is to cut the first comment that descends into incivility or flaming.
Conversations on HN sometimes get heated. Some people take people disagreeing with them as a personal attack and quickly descend into actual personal attacks in response. Those people may feel like they're being singled out by dang, but it's because they actually are misbehaving.
Look at his post history, you can see plenty of examples.
A pattern he follows very commonly is seen here [0]: "Can you stop doing $thing?" However, it's dang's opinion that $thing is occurring, and he makes zero effort to understand why $thing could even be happening, and further entertains zero challenges to his interpretation of what has taken place. It's, "stop doing $thing, which is definitely happening, or else I will ban you."
Here's another good example of dang handling moderation poorly [1]: he spends zero time explaining the situation, zero time listening to the perspective of the "accused", and simply, curtly, dismisses that person from the site.
Ironically, dang's intervention is often the most toxic behavior in a comment chain, and these examples are what I found in just the past two hours.
There are thousands, or more, people treated this way, and instead of concern, praise is constantly dumped on him, like what he's doing is some incredible or even desirable behavior!
The assumption is the site is better off without these people he treats poorly on it, but I doubt any rigor has been placed on that assumption whatsoever.
Your complaints are totally unreasonable and sound ridiculous to me. "dang's intervention is often the most toxic behavior in a comment chain" is laughable. If you look more into dang's comment history, he has often explained at length about the kind of issues you link to. Often his comments link to a whole lot of previous long explanations. I've spent hours down those rabbit holes, and it's the most impressive, insightful writing I've seen in my years on HN.
I was 'danged' once, after I angrily responded to someone who made an outrageous comment to me, attacking me strongly for saying cheating was bad. Dang objected to my comment. I said, what the other guy said was much worse! Dang hadn't even read the other guy's comment, which seemed so unfair.
He explained to me that it doesn't matter what the other guy said. "Punching second" or in any order, is not ok on here. Read the comment guidelines. He said that being on HN is a continual exercise is not being triggered, in not commenting while angry. They were wise words which I think greatly improved my HN comments, or at least I don't do those triggered, snarky, cutting responses any more, or almost never. No matter what the other guy said. Silence is often the best response, or the only good one. That someone else is being an asshole on here is no reason to join them.
You are apparently fairly new here, and seem to have little idea of the massive number of comments written on HN each day. I looked at the first couple of pages of your recent comments, and most of them have a very unpleasant, hostile tone. You are in no position to criticize dang. Read the "In comments" section of the guidelines, the part starting "Be kind. Don't be snarky." A lot of your comments break them.
Despite the haters and imperfections, I think HN is about as humane as a large, public, globally accessible online community could possibly be. It seems like one of those things that couldn't possibly last forever because it bucks the statistics of human nature too much.
A key move, and an utterly unique one to my knowledge, was having an extraordinary full time employee tending to it constantly.
Here's hoping it all lasts for as long as possible. Thanks dang.
Sometimes when I see an especially good comment on hacker news I click on the name and read through other things they've written. You find really insightful stuff this way.
One day I see dang write a comment that was really interesting about how threads tend to develop over time, like some kind of law of webforums.
I thought "ah ha! I'll go read a bunch of Dan's comments. I bet those are good."
But if you go look his profile is just nonstop very politely moderating people. All. The. Time.
'sillysaurusx -- I respect your opinions. I know that I respect your opinions because you're able to use HackerNews as a bully pulpit to reach a very wide audience and I personally both enjoy and look forward to seeing your participation. I've often wished I had better opportunities to learn from you and always silently wish you well on your personal journey.
I also see from your Twitter reply that you feel HN hasn't necessarily been a great platform for your participation. I just want to counter that feeling with real-world result: I've read hundreds of your comments and at least a dozen of your submissions. I suspect HackerNews is actually a fantastically appropriate platform for you, and not an adversarial one.
At any rate, the disconnect between what I perceive as an outside observer vs. what you perceive as a "man in the arena"[0] is a fascinating phenomenon in its own right.
One thing I learned from moderating an internet community in the past: Some of the long-term users had become experts at skirting the rules. They had seen so many posts and watched so many other people get moderated that they learned how to walk right up to the line without explicitly crossing it.
Some times they'd become very good at baiting other people into breaking the rules. Or they would writing extremely inflammatory comments in a pseudo-cordial writing style that looked friendly/naïve but was actually crafted to incite a flame war.
There was a lot of "You should know better" admonishing these provocateur forum members, but for many the only solution was to remove them from the forum completely.
A couple of very good computer forums that I depended on years ago were slowly destroyed by "long term users". A small group seemed to think that their long history and prolific posting made it their playground. Little by little it became less worth my time to check it out every day. This place is always worth a glance. Every day. On the best discussions you can sense that people only post if they feel they really have something to add.
I love what Dang refers to as HN's non-silowed nature. It is easy to find useful and fascinating discussions on any topic. When I have the time and energy, sometimes I dive in for a few hours. When I come up for air I'm tired but generally pleased with experience.
A common complaint here is that it ain't what it used to be. There may be a little more fluff now but when it's good - It's darn good.
This reminds me of a pub we used to go to occasionally in Berkshire. When one of the crusty old locals went to the bar, they were always served first, even if other customers had already been waiting a while. Great for them, but made for an unwelcoming vibe that definitely reduced their custom. We only put up with it because they had a great garden area for kids.
That last bit reminds me of Orwell's description of his ideal pub, the "Moon Under Water":
The great surprise of the Moon Under Water is its garden. You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are little green tables with iron chairs round them. Up at one end of the garden there are swings and a chute for the children.
On summer evenings there are family parties, and you sit under the plane trees having beer or draught cider to the tune of delighted squeals from children going down the chute. The prams with the younger children are parked near the gate.
Many as are the virtues of the Moon Under Water, I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.
And though, strictly speaking, they are only allowed in the garden, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children—and therefore, to some extent, women—from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be.
The Moon Under Water is my ideal of what a pub should be—at any rate, in the London area. (The qualities one expects of a country pub are slightly different.)
I'm sure the Moon Under Water would treat newcomers well, though!
Another feature of that pub I remember was a setup where patrons could dress up in Velcro vests, then jump onto a big trampoline and hurl themselves up as high as possible onto a Velcro wall where they stuck like flies. Fun times, if not Orwellian.
Yup. The tricky bit of moderation to me is dealing with well known, long term users. I find the particularly troublesome sort being people who have a good amount of contributions to their name, but a variable temper. If somebody's always a jerk that's pretty easy. The tricky bit is when it's inconsistent.
Other long term community members learn what sets this person off and avoid it, and so everything seems quiet for weeks until somebody unaware hits on just the wrong subject, and this old, seemingly respected member explodes at them.
This is problematic for a community. New people need to either learn to navigate this minefield, or decide that it's not worth it and leave. And a lot will definitely pick the second option.
I ended up banning just a few such people and I'd say things have improved greatly as a result. Yes, there's a loss in term of contribution from very skilled people, but if a single person sours the mood for several dozen, it's not a good tradeoff. And they tend to drive away other skilled people as well, who can easily leave and be welcome must anywhere else that doesn't require them to tiptoe around that one tricky person.
Context that I had to look up: sillysaurusx on HN is theshawwn on Twitter, whose replies to the submitted tweet this is a response to. (What makes that relative clause so hard to parse?)
That's a tough cookie for sure but sillysauraus is not seeing the big picture.
It is tragic that we don't have yummyfajitas' or michaelochurch's takes which went against the grain and were probably interesting in some ways, but they in the end shot themselves in the foot by delivering their message in odiously-scented wrappings. Frequently employing ad hominem attacks, calling women names, etc. quickly evaporates the credibility of the person behind them, sours the culture of the community, and is just not a very good thing to do, irrespective of whatever validity or truth is being conveyed.
That is just because most people leave when they don't like something. In a bad environment you would expect the majority of those who stay to still find the environment good and themselves rational, with only a few outspoken against it. It is a relatively basic concept in markets, sociology, biology, information systems and reasoning.
The person you and the comment next to me are talking about is not here to defend themselves. They are specifically not here to defend themselves because they aren't allowed to. The justification for them not being allowed to is because they talked badly about someone else. Yet, it is apparently accepted to talk badly about them.
Your are even saying that we shouldn't trust this person because they in your opnion engaged in ad hominem attacks. But by doing so you are arguably performing an ad hominem attack yourself. And while you can certainly make a meta argument against that it would be close enough for many not to touch it.
This is why many people leave. Not because it's the Internet. Most of us have been around that. But because it is bad version of it.
You might think this doesn't have real consequences so I will give you an example. Because of the environment on Hacker News there is a lack of successful Europeans. This in turn results in there being an overwhelming consensus that is less likely you make good amounts of money in Europe. But this often isn't the case if you know what to do. It is just that those who do either leave or stop talking about it. Which continues the existing narrative as the participants reality continues to match their opinions. While in reality their opinion may not really be supported.
An environment with one sided environment isn't harmless. It might actually give you a worse life. But the same argument as before also applies here. Those who appreciate this are the first to leave. Leaving those who stay blind to what is happening.
But it’s worth noting per Dang that sctb played role in building the data recovery system before it was needed — and mthurman helped deploy HN to AWS. Thanks sctb & mthurman!!
Posts like these, for me, highlight the class divide. PG thinks "few people" grasp how much effort dang expends, when in reality, a whole class of people working in customer service roles expend roughly the same amount of effort. Sure, dang might be uniquely efficient, but the expenditure of effort is on the same order.
I once witnessed a Delta employee in ATL process a queue of customers, all with issues regarding their seat number. Without knowing too much about the process, it seemed to me that she took everyone's story and fixed the seating arrangement so that everyone would be seated together by group. I was impressed, but she doesn't get any applause for solving (well, approximating) an NP-complete problem, and I doubt she focused on math during her years in education, and certainly she won't think to write a blog focused on "Solving the N-passengers, K-groups problem 30 minutes before boarding time." Most importantly, she could have easily said "not my problem," but didn't.
That is anecdata but it does not stand alone. I regularly witness about 10% of customer service personnel giving it their all to represent their company and keep customers happy. They are the "dangs" of those organizations, and they keep everything running smoothly. So it would seem "few people" is not accurate. Instead it's an huge lower-middle (under)class cohort keeping capitalist dreams alive.
I think you're on to something with this. dang does a fantastic job, but not an exceedingly rare job. What's rare is a "service worker" that the tech class respects enough to observe closely and be inspired by, because his work looks similar enough to theirs.
There's a specific term (Emotional Labor) coined by service workers to describe staying even-keeled when dealing with users/customers. That term wouldn't exist if "few people" grasped how hard that part of it is.
> PG thinks "few people" grasp how much effort dang expends, when in reality, a whole class of people working in customer service roles expend roughly the same amount of effort.
PG didn’t say that no one expends more effort than dang, he said that few people grasp the effort expended in moderating HN
I'd say the tendency is to absolutely trivialise the work that goes into moderating online forums. It should be easy, right, you just click buttons while sitting at home in your pajamas, no? Well no, not really.
I think most people don't understand how difficult it is to wield power over others when you're aiming for a good community. Many commenters who complain about any form of governance don't realize what a small fraction of power is actually used, and how much more oppressive their ideas would be in practice.
> Posts like these, for me, highlight the class divide.
To start from Paul G. saying "Thank you dang, ..." and end up at "...(under)class cohort keeping capitalist dreams alive" seems like stretching a particular framework of thought past the point where it usefully describes people.
Fortunately he doesn't have to go through what moderators of mainstream social media sites have to go through (for which they often need long-term therapy), still, it feels unfair to saddle one man with so much of that.
Give him a nice long vacation already, the responsibility should probably be split among a 5-10 person team anyway.
A lot of replies on twitter critique dang on moderating their comments. But in reality, I think this is a good thing. There are already enough near-total-free speech zones on the Internet (and we see how many of them turn out). It's far more personally interesting to me to see how a conversations in a space moderated above a certain threshold evolves.
I've always been grateful and impressed by how kind and compassionate and educational @dang's responses to me have been, both in public and in private.
He's inspired me to approach many more social interactions that I'd historically be annoyed or short with someone as a teaching moment that can be, for lack of a better term, leveraged into a happy outcome for both participants. It was something I never really considered before.
We're all better off for having these interactions with him. Thanks so much, Mr. G!
Seeing how @dang handles trolls, delicate topics and inflamed egos just made me accept the fact that I will never be such a patient person; I truly appreciate how extraordinary their work is.
I wonder how does dang manage it everyday. HN moderation can be so tiring. There is multitude of comment types: insightful, accusatory, snarky etc. And dang does point out the egregious ones every time.
Wikimedia's statistics tools for its wikis includes a bubble chart of number of edits by a user per hour of day per day of week[1] (AFAICT a type of graph called a punchcard chart), used precisely for when you wonder this about a Wikimedia user.
That and other detailed statistics are only shown for users who opt in, but anyone motivated can process a database dump locally, even using XTools itself, which is open source. Edit history can reveal a lot of information about a user, so this an inevitable privacy problem for any scrapable site.
I think the community here is the other part of the equation. I see HN as a gigantic spinning apparatus that occasionally gets out of alignment by a few microns. Dan simply adds a bit of corrective force in a few areas as appropriate to keep everything happy.
Twitter is a bunch of pigs wallowing in a pit of mud by comparison. You could put a million dangs in there and they would still wind up as muddy as everyone else at the end of the day. Making twitter less crap likely requires some orbital bombardment analogies.
To clean Twitter, wouldn't it be enough to let people create filter groups, kind of like Brave Goggles [1] that are lists of accounts or lists of lists of accounts
?
People would cluster themselves into groups with consistent values and you would just need some moderators for minor adjustments.
I agree with all the asspats for dang on the day-to-day moderation level. If anything I'd like to see more of a heavy hand from him. I've modded some moderately-sized Reddit subs and it was hell.
However, in strategic terms, I think HN has failed to maintain a good comment signal-to-noise ratio over the past several years. For instance it used to be that "funny" or entertaining type of low-effort comments would be strongly discouraged with downvotes; at some point in the past few years it has become very common and... REminiscent of another social site that I'm not supposed to draw comparisons to due to HN guidelines.* Now it's common to see jokes and puns do quite well.
Fundamentally, to maintain a board's culture you need to encourage people to "lurk more" to get acclimated to the board's culture before participating. In other words you need to throttle/retard new users' participation somewhat.
I do recall at one point a push to increase commenting by removing comment average karma in user profiles. (Some) people used to withhold commenting unless they felt they had a real banger because it would throw off their ratio. It also used to be new user signups were only open occasionally rather than always available.
My hypothesis on where it went wrong is cost-free upvotes. Downvotes have always been gated behind a karma threshold, but any new account can upvote whatever it wants. Floods of new accounts thoughtlessly upvoting the types of comments they upvote on other sites will easily outpace the old timers' downvotes on that same content. Over time, this small change in karma dynamics shifts the board culture.
* Like the guideline wording, dang frequently brushes away this critique out of hand, but as someone who goes long periods between visiting HN regularly, it's very obvious to me. I think you could quantify it if you took random samples of HN comments from various time slices and noted the quantity of low-effort comments.
disheartened, as usual, to see an insightful comment lurking nearer the bottom of the page than the top, while a bunch of throwaway fawnings sit above it[0]. i have a pet theory that there can only ever be about a dozen good comments on a thread, and hn usually does a terrible job surfacing them. the (poor) karma-to-tenure ratio you describe is certainly one of the mechanisms by which this goes wrong. i actually liked slashdot's voting mechanics the best of all the forums i've ever visited. it wasn't perfect, but did a better job at surfacing good comments.
i've actually been thinking about how to solve this problem lately, at least for myself. the hn api doesn't look like much fun to work with however.
[0]: that's not to say that i don't appreciate dang, i do, but it's cloying to say the least.
no doubt that there's some good intent there, but the public performativeness just undermines the genuineness for me.
i do think a dampening function on repetitive messages/sentiments would be a net-good however, since repetitiveness is not where the interesting/insightful points tend to be.
It would be valuable to automatically detect that sort of repetition—repetition is pretty much what we're trying to avoid on HN. Although a certain amount of it can be good for morale I suppose.
Re intent: many people underestimate good intent in these cases. My experience interacting with users is that they're mostly trying to say good and helpful things, even when what they actually say is bad and unhelpful.
also, given the eternal september phenomenon where things that are new to new members are often tired and trite to older members/people, perhaps there's a "maturity" factor that can calibrate what gets surfaced to whom and how much gets collapsed (but still accessible), rather than a single function for everybody. that way new members get to establish some of those same baseline points and arguments without wearing out the "seniors" with retreads.
totally agree that most people have good intentions most of the time, but i'm skeptical of motivations in a public context. intentions and motivations cross purposes all the time, and cheap social points, like junk food, are nearly irresistable to our evolutionarily-culled pro-social chemical pathways.
I've been banned by Dang before, but of all the moderators on the internet I still like him the most. He tries hard and after all these years still works in good faith as far as I can tell. HN wouldn't be what it is without him.
He should write a book on moderating online communities.
Not joking, we are trying to build a large online community now and I would love to pick his brain on balancing incentives, encouraging curiosity, having equanimity, and all kinds of aspects in “practical sociology”.
I think his in-the-trenches experience would benefit many people trying to build and maintain healthy online communities.
When someone has developed a remarkable approach that could be considered almost like the textbook guidelines that others could learn from, that's when someone else with meaningful subject interest needs to follow them around with a clipboard until there's enough juicy content for a book, and edit it for publication together.
More likely to disseminate best practices much sooner than waiting for a mission-critical operator to have time to write it themselves.
I second this. I have seen so many thriving online communities fail in short time because the moderator screwed up. The declines of many subreddits are classic examples. Yet, dang has successfully managed this community for years. I would like to learn from him!
Well dang. I've certainly enjoyed the site over the years. I know you're compensated for your work. But, I don't think you're quite well-compensated for your work. I would like to offer a humble thanks from those in the community that I've learned from over the years and for dang and company's moderation.
Thank you for everything you do, dang. Us geeks are an incredibly diverse set of people so, by design, a forum that lets them communicate with each other is always going to have its challenges.
Agree. HN is not a charity and it is most certainly profitable enough to be able to not have so much effort vested in one person (if that is the case that is).
I understand fully PG thanking him publicly for his effort and the pats on the back (by others here) but let's face it it's a job in the end and he is doing his job.
As far as I can tell from this article [1] - The lonely work of moderating Hacker News (2019) - it's a full-time job. The article was discussed at length on HN [2].
My guess is that to some extent, YC benefits from having this around in a form people actually want to use - they are able to surface the projects they have funded on it and that can help drive engagement to those projects. If they attempted to monetize the platform itself, it would likely drive away many of the users that would otherwise be interested in or be possible hires for the companies they fund.
I believe the occasional YC hiring posts are also part of the deal, given the audience that tends to hang out here
I seriously wish the monthly "Who's Hiring" and "Who Wants to be Hired?" were a more structured feature of the site, but maybe that's the charm of them
Great - he created another site that embraces censorship, echo chambers, and mob rule, very similar to twitter, just with a tech / academic theme. Amazing accomplishment.
Shadowbanning is reserved for spammers and for new accounts that show signs of abusing the site, e.g. by trolling or egregiously breaking the site guidelines, or if there's evidence that they're related to past accounts that have been abusing the site. It's not a good idea to use explicit banning in all of these cases (for different reasons).
This system has drawbacks—banning new accounts means guessing—by definition, there isn't a lot of information to go on—and we guess wrong sometimes. But we try to correct those errors later. Btw, if anyone notices a banned account that shouldn't be banned, please let us know at [email protected]—we've unbanned many accounts that way.
In fact I'm just working on a ban review system that will make it much easier for mods to track banned accounts that are still posting and unban the ones who are making good contributions (whether because we guessed wrong when banning them, or because they've reformed since having been banned).
On rare occasion I've seen [banned] accounts as well with showdead on.
Weird thing I've noticed is [dead] accounts that aren green tend to be typical troll, spam, or people who can't calm down during certain discussions. They may even have some comments still love.
[banned] accounts on the other hand tend to be completely deragned. They seem almost obsessed. Despite being banned they continue to make essay posts about whatever it is that got them hanne over large periods of time. Could be bots, but the complexity and variety of the language in the posts tends to be moderately complex.
I've seen dang warn people their conduct is bannable many times.
AFAIK shadowbanning on HN means your comments default to "dead", as if they had been flagged. You can see them if you enable "showdead" in your profile, and if people vouch for them, they can become visible again. See Terry Davis' comment history for examples (this is the only shadowbanned account I know of): https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis - if you look a few pages in, you'll see some live comments of him talking about the early days of Ticketmaster and such.
To me this seems like a better solution than simply kicking people out who are unable to uphold the minimum guidelines necessary to engage in reasonably civil discourse. What would you suggest as an alternative?
The crucial part of shadowbanning is that the one subjected to it is can't (easily) see that their comments/post are being hidden from others. It's like the difference between rejecting spam mail and silently dropping it. Since actual shadowbanning is all about showing a different view of the world to the affected user compared to everyone else we can't see if TerryADavis has been shadowbanned or not.
Shadowbanning might be effective against actual spammers but preventing the user from seeing that they were banned removes even more accountability from the moderation than other tools which makes shadowbanning particularly prone to abuse as well as mistakes that won't get fixed. I think it's pretty dishonest to punish someone without telling them they are being punished.
It's also worth pointing out that shadowbanning is more effective against good faith users than malicious users since all it takes is to check using a disconnected session to uncover the ruse - something that will hardly be difficult for a motivated malicious user.
Try harder. HN uses a lisp, which is a programming language family from the sixties. Can it possibly be any more obsolete — according to the test you prefer? Something has to be very wrong with HN. Unless the problem is that the test is bonkers.
Moreso, it’s a place for thoughtful discussion. I’ve seen great comments from people I’ve disagreed with get lots of positive attention, and trolling comments from people I agree with downvoted into oblivion. I respect that.
It a place for politics now. Many "guidelines" are written in a sufficiently vague way that they can be interested widely and contradict other guidelines if you apply a healthy amount of pedantry.
It seems that if the politics meet a certain criteria, they are allowed ad nauseam. You also see where certain names are allowed to say things where others are chastised for the rebuttal of said things.
I just find it comically ironic that the same community infamous for sleuthing and demanding the full root cause of failure from their favourite faang darlings and various digital feudal estates has been so quiet, forgiving, and reflective about the HN outage and its cause. am I missing something? does anyone know what caused the failure?
We weren't quiet. There were lots of questions about the cause of the outage... along with detailed answers, and discussions of those answers: [1][2][3]
Thanks for all the posts! In the future, it might be helpful to use different (compatible) hardware for the backup server so it doesn't have the same issue that caused the main to fail, like how redundant aircraft systems are made by different teams.
HN is a tiny forum which basically runs on a single machine with a single backup. There are surely only a few people monitoring it. It’s used by about ~1 million people a day, and nobody really “relies” on HN.
GitHub, Facebook, Google, AWS etc. are massive clusters of over 1000 servers spread across continents, with multiple failure modes and run by many DevOps. Many people and services rely on them being up. They’re used by billions each day.
Yet HN has more uptime than these behemoths, and way more uptime than e.g. Slack. It’s also faster, even though it’s only one server. HN went down for 2 (?) hours. HN also promptly posts why it went down. In this case because both the main and backup server failed.
Of course HN is definitely more reliable because it’s only one server. But it’s still impressive and shows that you can reach a large audience with a simple setup and few resources. Maybe if Google, Facebook, AWS, etc. found more straightforward solutions they too could have more uptime.
> That's because HN does a lot less, and is a lot simpler.
Complexity is not a virtue. HN has a lot of depth when you look beyond its interface. The abstractions don't always have to exist in code, operations or UI.
What % of the Slack feature set is actually used by a majority of its users at least once a month?
They have been super transparent about the HN stack and both outages. A disk failed in their collocated server. They migrated to their backup server, and lost a disk in that server in the same manner.
They temporarily stood up an AWS instance from a backup, and are working on a permanent fix.
HN isn't Amazon or Facebook. It's not a for-profit operation relied on by millions for their business. It doesn't have a blog where its engineers document the latest way they squeezed a few percent more performance. It appears to be a shoestring operation run in a frugal fashion.
Why anyone would expect people to have the same attitude towards that as Facebook is beyond me.
> quiet, forgiving, and reflective about the HN outage and its cause.
If Cloudflare, AWS or Google goes down, it affects millions of people directly and often financially. If HN goes down, we simply find another way to waste time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
Respect and many thanks, dang.