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SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-a-lonely-job dept.

The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (archive)

Can a human touch make Silicon Valley's biggest discussion forum a more thoughtful place?

[...] At first, the site attracted about sixteen hundred daily visitors, and [venture capitalist Paul] Graham moderated and maintained it himself. Today, around five million people read Hacker News each month, and it's grown more difficult to moderate. The technical discussions remain varied and can be insightful. But social, cultural, and political conversations, which, despite the guidelines, have proliferated, tend to devolve. A recent comment thread about a Times article, "YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views," yielded a response likening journalism and propaganda; a muddled juxtaposition of pornography and Holocaust denial; a vague side conversation about the average I.Q. of Hacker News commenters; and confused analogies between white supremacists and Black Lives Matter activists. In April, when a story about Katie Bouman, an M.I.T. researcher who helped develop a technology that captured the first photo of a black hole, rose to the front page, users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions.

[...] Picturing the moderators responsible for steering conversation on Hacker News, I imagined a team of men who proudly self-identify as neoliberals and are active in the effective-altruism movement. (I assumed they'd be white men; it never occurred to me that women, or people of color, could be behind the site.) Meeting them, I feared, would be like participating in a live-action comment thread about the merits of Amazon Web Services or whether women should be referred to as "females." "Debate us!" I imagined them saying, in unison, from their Aeron chairs.

The site's real-life moderators are Daniel Gackle and Scott Bell, two wildly polite old friends. On Facebook and YouTube, moderation is often done reactively and anonymously, by teams of overworked contractors; on Reddit, teams of employees purge whole user communities like surgeons removing tumors. Gackle and Bell, by contrast, practice a personal, focussed, and slow approach to moderation, which they see as a conversational act. They treat their community like an encounter group or Esalen workshop; often, they correspond with individual Hacker News readers over e-mail, coaching and encouraging them in long, heartfelt exchanges.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:00PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:00PM (#880095) Homepage Journal

    We don't have an owner. We do have two shareholders but they hold equal shares and would both have to agree on $whatever. Since they're shareholders because they forked out thousands of their own moneys to get a refuge for us from the bullshit of /. up and running, I think it's safe to say neither of them are big on heavy-handed bullshit.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Interesting=1, Informative=2, Total=3
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5