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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: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:44PM (3 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:44PM (#880167)

    But social, cultural, and political conversations, which, despite the guidelines, have proliferated, tend to devolve

    By devolve, they mean have a diversity of opinion. The site is intensely groupthink oriented and diversity of opinion is frankly not allowed, often even in technical discussions. This makes the site pretty weak in that all discussion has begun to revolve around who can be the best at conforming to groupthink, so the quality of discussion declines into boring uselessness.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Alfred on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:07PM (2 children)

    by Alfred (4006) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:07PM (#880198) Journal
    Unfortunately, this is a consequence of "normal" human behavior. To think about an alternative point takes effort and people are lazy. To actually consider a point contrary to your own takes extra effort. It is easier to get mad about a contrary point than to consider it because to seek truth means you have to admit the possibility of being not completely right yourself. These days there is not a topic with sides that both sides won't become violent given a chance. I can talk civilly about a topic, when I'm being serious, but I can't really find anyone else to do the same. SN is no exception.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:41PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:41PM (#880315)

      The antidote to this is to accept:

      1) Different opinions exist
      2) You will not change *everyone's* opinion
      3) Some people believe things that are incorrect and will continue to do so. The world won't end.
      4) IT'S A FREE COUNTRY - KEEP IT THAT WAY

      • (Score: 2) by Alfred on Thursday August 15 2019, @01:28PM

        by Alfred (4006) on Thursday August 15 2019, @01:28PM (#880558) Journal
        Your first 3 points are just human nature and will not change. The things you can change are the most important parts. those parts being your #4 and my #5) Don't beat me down (physically or verbally) if I say something you don't like.