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.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:46AM
If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody sawheard it, who gives a fuck?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:22AM (1 child)
Is this the Soylent News owner giving us a heads-up? I hear you bro. Stay strong.
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:00PM
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.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:29AM (1 child)
Pfft. Amateurs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:45AM
Need to hire some professional anti-trolls to keep the discussions real. Just like they've done on TV with reality shows.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @08:40AM (2 children)
Besides spam control, moderation is mostly unneeded. For some reason, forum moderators tend to devolve into power tripping control freaks that only allow their kind of view points, attracting e-drama, a hell of their own making.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @11:56AM (1 child)
On. The. Money.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:50PM
That mod ban did you well, maybe you should buy that person a drink to thank for the spank? Since you'll be doing it yourself maybe you can throw in another spank before Sept?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:07PM (1 child)
Conspiracy theorists have been talking about men like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein for years before it became fashionable. Where was the mainstream media? Where was all this righteous indignation when Epstein was being given a sweetheart deal for soliciting a teenage girl for prostitution a decade ago? It might be worth asking why people believe conspiracy theories, and what that says about the media's reputation for being mouthpieces of the powerful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:09PM
Wrong post, oh well.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:44PM (3 children)
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Alfred on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:07PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:41PM (1 child)
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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:46PM (1 child)
The summary of the article came across as very narcissitic and said more about the emotional author than anyone else.
It sounded stereotypically female, and a look at the author's name confirmed it. Too bad. Is it just because there is an easy market for aggrieved "minority" authors that this is what women write?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @09:58PM
Narcissitic? Hardly. It's just a small delving into Gonzo journalism, something the New Yorker does with regularity.
Perhaps you should adjust what you consider appropriate stereotypes for females are? Yours sound a little 19th century, with a healthy dash of patriarchally thinking you know what women write from your own ample life experience. Or better yet, obtain some counseling for your inability to understand normal human emotions.