I'm going to throw one out for dang here. I took your moderating personally when I first joined here, got banned for some comments I didn't think were that bad, hell i've made worse since, spent a while posting greyed out comments going off at dang, posted some not so shitty comments that got given a chance, realized I should try harder in my comments and just push my way back in by writing things that contribute better to HN.
It would have been easy to start a new account, but I liked warring with dang at the time. I even emailed him a bunch appealing my, what I still believe is not really all that bad of a comment, but I accept why it got me in shit as a newer commenter. It spurred me to just try harder at contributing better.
Eventually, I was just randomly unbanned.
Since then, i've come appreciate HN's moderation style.
There's really not many places on the internet with such lax account rules, yet mostly good conversation.
I appreciate the surprisingly wide range of topics and viewpoints generally allowed here. It does get a bit echo chambery, but mostly, any issue tends to get both sides heard as long as comments are written constructively.
Also, just learning about the purpose of this site helped. This is a news website, first and foremost, for people interested in funding from YC. It may have expanded since then, but the moderation does reflect the intended purpose of this site and just generally the kind of discourse expected from people interested in YC funding or other such things.
I respect how you've grown as a result of your interaction with HN. We're not about trying to stay just below the line here. There's no nefarious Man holding us down. We just want a certain level of civil discourse. I try not to say anything here that I wouldn't say in person, or wouldn't want tied to my real identity. I can be obnoxious at times, here and in person, and I appreciate being called out for it. HN is now the only place I interact with random Internet people, because the civility level is so high.
I’m delighted to announce that Daniel Gackle (pronounced Gackley), who has already been doing most of the moderation for the last 18 months, is going to join YC full-time to be in charge of the HN community. Many HN users know Daniel as gruseom, though now he’s going to switch to the slightly more legit sounding dang.
Haha yes I discovered this like a year ago, and still get a kick out of it when I'm so overloaded that I am reflecting on usernames as opposed to getting work done...
I've had several submissions re-upped. I nominate others (via email) on occaision. '2nd chance nom', plus submission link.
Do NOT ask me to do this --- I base my recommendations on what strikes me as 1) credible content 2) that seems underappreciated. The submission queue ("new" link in top menue) is quite busy.
Thanks for linking that. TIL: sorting rank is a function of timestamp and votes, so when the mods push a story back to the front page, instead of special-casing the behavior, they just (get a computer to) fabricate a submission timestamp that puts the story in appropriate place on the front page.
It's a clever hack, alright, but dang if I didn't start to think I was going crazy, because something felt off with timestamps and surely the mods wouldn't be silently messing with those...
It's not a great solution because it confuses the people who notice. The problem is that it's even more confusing if we re-up posts that say "3 days ago" or whatever onto the front page. Then the threads fill up with "why is this 3 days ago post on the front page"?
Another option would be to clone the old submission into a new one, but then we get more dupes. And I don't know of any viable fourth option.
Maybe display the old timestamp, but also display a visible "re-up" tag next to it? This way it'll be obvious the submission was reinserted manually to give it a second chance.
Fourth option - don't show dates or timestamps at all. The age of the actual article is what matters, and people can find that out by actually reading the article.
I think there's a lot of information in those timestamps. They convey the rhythms of the site. Of course that's also why fudging them causes confusion...
When I first came to HN from reddit, I posted some jokey nonsense comment. A moderator gently scolded me. I really disliked it. Now, I see the wisdom of keeping the jokes to a minimum and focusing in thoughtful discussion. So thank you, mods.
That's what impressed me when I first came across HN - the signal-to-noise ratio. The comments sections were always filled with thoughtfully written comments that provided useful insights into interesting topics.
Thank you @dang for your diligence and commitment to the task.
Hot take: the fact that HN comments have an academic/professional tone doesn't make the noise go away. It just makes it easier to pass for useful comments.
On huge threads with like 1k comments, I do find that the high quality ones float to the surface (having more to do with stuff like hiding vote counts and restricting down vote access IMO). However, it's not hard to find people confidently talking out of their ass making it to the top of threads with even hundreds of comments. Look for people talking about something you are an expert in (or do a brief google search on a topic somebody is claiming expertise in, especially if it is related to ideology) and it isn't hard to spot. There are even all the bad cliche comments of the other platforms even if they aren't as simple as "have an upvote my friend" or "username checks out".
I find threads on politics and culture particularly unbearable here because it's the exact same chest beating and narratives that you will find on any other platform except that the posters possess the same self-rightousness and academic tone as if they were talking about mathematical fact and not a political opinion. Even more so, it often comes without the self-awareness to know that your opinions and arguments are most often being taken from whatever social media you frequent. Everybody is a "free thinker" here even though they spout off the exact same political arguments as everybody else in their clique. It makes some threads pretty toxic IMO because of how seriously everyone takes themselves. I'm of course making general claims to which there are exceptions, but this is something I've seen.
Thinking that you need to be super-intelligent to post on or browse HN is a bad meme. Take the guy below me that thinks jokes on HN "require higher levels of intelligence to parse". It's the same mentality that part of the Rick and Morty fan base gets made fun of for.
To make a distinction, my comment applies specifically to the comments that pertain to technical topics and that which are backed by actual (scientific) research and data.
I have no interest in the cultural warfare that supposedly educated ideologues seek to impose on society at large.
For me the noise is still there, even if it takes another form. Jokes, puns and nastiness are swapped for hacker-y style rants (we know how idiosyncratic many of hackers are) or people who talk about things they lack the knowledge of.
Ironically, under front page HN submissions where comments would give some context, often there are none. Who upvoted them all the way to the front page? People who want to feel intelligent? Edit: this may be related to the moderator's override function where they put some submissions manually on the front page.
There are still jokes, they just require higher levels of intelligence to parse now. Without the ability to inject obvious humor, many jokes straddle the threshold of Poe's Law. Sometimes people mistake a thoughtful sounding well written comment as sincere.
> "[dang] later told me that he sees frustration at work as part of the DNA of Hacker News. “The instinct that there simply has to be a better way to build systems, and the yearning to connect with it,” he said. “If you can’t do that at your job, and few can, then you can at least dream and read and argue about it on the Internet. Hacker News is the inverse image of many people’s jobs, overlaid on top of each other—an escape valve for frustrated idealists.”
^ My favorite line in the whole piece. It resonates.
The phrase inverse image means something specific in mathematics, so I'm getting confused trying to connect that meaning with dang's quote—like, what is the function?
This place is amazing, and I learned so much about a variety of topics. Most of my MD colleagues use Twitter or Facebook, where the signal-to-noise is much, much lower. I assume there have been plenty of spin-offs from HN (I would LOVE to have a similar forum for discussing medical issues; Can I fork the codebase somehow?), but I do think the secret sauce is moderation.
Also, politically, I'm "an enlightened centrist" lol and nearly all of the political spectrum here is represented well IMO, and even personal attacks/strawman arguments are not immediately banned but first discouraged.
I followed a lot of economists (ie Robert Reich, Krugman, etc) thinking they would post interesting economics related content. They do, but it turns out that they are ordinary humans who like posting the same tweets (and rants) that I would post.
I don't think Twitter can have the same signal to noise ratio as a well moderated forum like HN, even if you follow the "right" people, because the format of the site incentivizes a different style of discussion.
HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person)
Twitter seems to value the individual, but devalue the content. (E.g. low quality posts by a famous person)
The former is more meritorious, inasmuch as the vote base can accurately judge a comment. The latter is more consistent, in that popular people stay popular (and admittedly, are popular for a reason).
Personally, I prefer the HN-style model, but I also believe it only works as long as the ratio of HN-encultured users to bad / average actors stays above a certain threshold. From a technical and vote system perspective, HN isn't that different than Reddit: what makes it HN is the culture and community.
Thats an interesting observation. Username based forums value the content, while Twitter (where your identity is public) values the individual and his/her expertise.
The issue with the former is that it relies on upvotes of people from the community. This leads to the problem of people upvoting comments on topics in which they lack expertise (ie developers upvoting comments about astronomy that "sound right")
This results in a trend (on HN and reddit) where the most upvoted comments are comments that "sound correct", but would not hold up against scrutiny of people who have expertise in that area. I like that HN censors the upvote count, so we are forced to judge the comment on its own merit.
Karma scores are not front-and-center, though. Years ago, they switched to hide the score of an individual piece of content (such that an unvoted content is visually the same as one that has 100 upvotes [it might be sorted differently, but otherwise is indistinguishable]). To my mind, that was one of the better changes to the quality of community moderation.
Agreed. And HN has something I associate with it specifically: the back-and-forth argument, maintaining consistency in positions and reasoning, looking like two people taking. But, upon inspection, many people are involved. That, I think, is an example of the de-emphasis on identity.
> I followed a lot of economists (ie Robert Reich, Krugman, etc) thinking they would post interesting economics related content.
I think you have to stop following famous people like those guys, and instead follow up-and-coming economists and other scientists and bleeding edge researchers/builders, who are working hard to make a name for themselves with novel research in some interesting area.
Those are more likely to keep their Twitter feed focused on their research, rather than off-topic tweets, rants, political advocacy and "influencer" stuff people do once they become famous.
Also, the community of people who engage with them tend to be similarly focused, so you can find more high S:N folks to follow in their discussions.
If you curate your Twitter feed to just those types, you get a very high S:N ratio there.
My personal favorite is Noah Smith (NoOpinon or some similar spelling). He is a journalist at Bloomberg. His articles are posted quite frequently on HN. His twitter has a lot of interesting discussions.
I've started using the Lists feature of Twitter a ton, carefully curating users who tend to post around specific topics that I'm interested in. Then I just poke my head in the appropriate list whenever I want to catch up on what's been happening in a given subject. Totally changed my Twitter experience.
> I've started using the Lists feature of Twitter a ton, carefully curating users who tend to post around specific topics that I'm interested in. Then I just poke my head in the appropriate list whenever I want to catch up on what's been happening in a given subject.
I've been doing the same (although I've actually been on a break from Twitter for over a year now). Care to share links to your lists?
BTW, it took me forever to realize that I didn't have to follow an account in order to put it in a list. I've been putting off a serious pruning (several thousand) of who I follow, and I wish there were better tools for doing that pruning.
I think the best example I can share is one that I actually can't take credit for, came across it a few weeks back. It's a list of people actively working on .NET: https://twitter.com/i/lists/120961876 My own lists aren't ready for "primetime" yet :)
That’s part of Krugman’s persona - he does plenty of ranting - agreed on trying other economists. I like Stiglitz but no one is immune from human moments on twitter :P
Twitter deliberately promotes outrage. While hateful screaming is nothing new in the world of politics (or elsewhere), for Twitter and other ad-sellers this is a way to capture attention of users and drag them into flame wars.
I don't see "so and so Liked this tweet" in my feed, and I only see get a handful of promoted tweets, so it feels like they've eased up on adding noise to our feeds. I also set my location (arbitrarily) to Cook Islands, and now my "$LocalArea trends" widget is empty (thank God), so with aggressive culling I now have a Twitter feed that shows me what I asked to see.
It might be useful to note that I don’t actually have a Twitter account. So I just read a handful of people’s pages once in a while who do a good job of pulling in all the best things of the communities I care about, and also people send me tweets from time to time. So usually I can skip over most of the drama.
You can (and I propose you should) use Twitter with the chronological timeline feature enabled. It's why Twitter is usable for me while Facebook is not.
One of these days someone at Twitter will remember they bought Tweetdeck and start messing with it in the same way they do for the main site and apps, but until then it’s fantastic.
dang has already mentioned the original Arc forum but I'd be remiss not to mention Anarki[0], the public fork. It's diverged quite a bit from Hacker News though so don't expect feature parity.
Thank you very much for adding much needed diversity to HN. I'm one of the gazillion software people here and it's great to have insightful comments from experts in other fields.
Swift invisible action when facing bad faith actors; sporadic public call outs for quick attitude correction; and consistent helpful presence like multi-page reminders and clarifications on the inner workings of this forum.
I find your style of moderation to be the golden standard on how to foster a healthy online community.
Oh so he gets to shadowban other people and get credit for telling you about the secret crazy punishments they use here.
Shadowbanning is psychopathy and if you disagree, then logically you should never have been told about it.
I’ve also seen him be accused of biases involving his supposedly being Chinese. It’s sad when anything on HN turns into a flame war, and it would happen a lot more without his constant intervention.
I’ve put up a bunch of stories, most get no traction. However on the weekend once in a while I get a message from HN that one of my stories is pretty interesting and I should repost it. While every other service relies completely on some algorithm, it’s good to see a place like HN where people are jumping in and trying to stabilize things.
"We thought you might like to know that we put [HN link] in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page sometime in the next 24 hours."
Another I got a few times in 2015 starts:
"[link] looks good, but didn't get much attention. Would you care to repost it? You can do so here: [link]."
Former might be a newer version of the latter, going by email dates.
I just want to say I love this community and am grateful for the heroic work Daniel (dang) and others have devoted through the years to maintain it, both technical and social.
The article showcased some of the more extreme comments out of what I've found to be, overall, a cornucopia of informative and thoughtful discourse.
This quote in particular was poignant and I think epitomizes a core value that makes this place special:
There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work. What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with individual users. That, case by case by case, seems to move the needle.
I come from a very small town in Brazil in the middle of nowhere. I was interested in Tech since I was a kid, but had zero influence around me.
I was a police officer for many years when I decided to go to university and study computer science. There, by a recommendation of a great professor, I got introduced to Hacker News. First time I saw this website, my mind was blown by the amount of rich information and links pointing me to gold pages on the web I have never heard of.
But this was just the shallow surface. Once I discovered the comments section and started reading the threads, I was once again astonished by the rich content and discussions going on. Sometimes, I spend hours just reading brilliant comments here and learning from people way smarter than me.
Thanks for this community and the moderators for making this happen :D
That's great to read. Very glad you found your way here! HN has connected many people with their 'tribe' over the years, both online and in person with each other. I think that is the best aspect of what PG created with this site. I also think that we could maybe find new ways to encourage more real-world connections. It feels to me like a lot of potential energy could turn kinetic if that happened.
> Every member who signs up will be sent the name of another randomly-chosen member on the 1st of every month. Each pair can arrange a brief informal meet-up at a time that suits both parties – be it a phone call, Skype call, Google Hangout or even a coffee in person.
> “RCTs have given me the opportunity to talk to people who work in areas that I don’t usually come across in my day to day work.” Lesley Goodburn, Patient Experience Consultant
> RCTs allow Q members to connect with a new member each month and hear about what other colleagues are working on and share any ideas and inspiration. There are no rules here – RCTs should be viewed as an informal opportunity to connect with peers, however if scheduling means that you can’t meet that month then it’s ok.
> We think you’ll enjoy these fun and fruitful conversations – it’s organised serendipity. Matthew Mezey, Q’s Community Manager has written a blog about the benefits of RCTs.
IMO, the most important work that upvotes and downvotes do is to move comments up and down the page.
In that context, HN consensus on downvoting jokes makes more sense. I like a good joke, but they belong on the bottom of the page after the "serious" conversation. It's unfortunate that it's overloaded with karma, but complicating the upvote/downvote system has other drawbacks.
Agreed. Humour is a good part of good conversation and an excellent way to provide insight without seeming to be condescending and/or obnoxious.
That being said,it does take skill to squeeze in a dad joke in a discussion of abstract computing problems related to 8081s and I'll go on a limb that HN not lenient on badly executed D-jokes as say reddit would for the attempt.
what about relevant/important things that many people don't agree with? Preventing any community from becoming 1-sided seems like a hard problem to solve, but no less important.
+1. I was having a really bad day several months ago and in a spat with a higher karma user who I really thought was in the wrong. @dang stepped in and just about banned me -- but stopped short and said this:
> There's clearly a pattern here. I'm not going to ban you now because you've also posted good comments, but please don't post any more personal attacks to HN, and please avoid tedious tit-for-tat entanglements with other users where the argument slides further to the right of the page as it slides further down in quality.
It sounds pretty stupid to say that I had a change of heart moment there, but I did. Whether or not I disagreed with another user on the internet was besides the point -- what was I getting out of /engaging/ with it that way? Was I acting the way I would want someone else to behave in a community? Of course not.
It turns out (as is often the case) that I was /extremely/ unhappy with my old job, burnt out and really struggling to keep it together and prevent the toxicity of my management chain from seeping into my personal life. Altogether very unsuccessfully, I might add. So I left. I didn't like the person I was turning into on the internet, pandemic or not.
Now, in retrospect, while I don't disagree with the content of what I said, I cringe with how I said it, and that I even engaged in the first place. In large part because that kind of engagement goes against the spirit of this forum which I cherish so much and find a reprieve from much of the rest of the internet.
A reprieve in large part due to the tireless, high quality work of @dang -- a reprieve that I myself threatened. Now isn't that self-destructive and ironic? Well, if you're reading this @dang, thanks for not banning me. You taught me a valuable lesson which I already knew but which just wasn't sinking in. I'd like to hope I am beginning to more deeply internalize the lesson you taught me that day.
While I have never been banned, I have been warned several times by dang about my behavior and I deserved every one of them. It seems to have worked too, because a lot of times I'll write a nasty comment and there will be this little voice in my head asking "what's dang going to think of this?" and I'll either edit it, not post it, or delete it.
When I feel a bit to much about a subject I open notepad and write the comment there and then just close the window if it feels inappropriate. This way there is no risk that I accidentally post it but it still feels like I got to say what I wanted to say. And then I can write something more levelheaded.
There's also the 'delay' setting that you can set in your HN user profile, which gives you 1-10 minutes to edit your comment before it becomes visible to others. This has saved my bacon on many occasions.
I really need to start using this, thank you so much! Not sure why I never payed much attention to those settings... but I know I edit my comments way too much after posting.
As for dang and his moderation, I appreciate very much his not-so-gentle nudging towards better conversation. I still fail frequently, but I try (and hope I am doing better). I had a particular ban that I got annoyed about because I thought the other guy deserved one too, but the real lesson was that it was about my response... and while it took a while, I took the correction to heart. Thanks dang for that, and for putting up with my more unothordox comments in a time when that is less and less tolerated.
Oh man, I do love it when systems provide me tools to stop my arsehole nature coming out. Sometimes I can't do it myself. I'll be enabling this for sure.
Never knew it was built in. I do the same as other people: I type it into the text box, walk away, come back to my computer later and if I still think it’s worth posting, do so. Probably abandon 75% of my “contributions” that way.
It also helps that you can only post like 5 times per 24 hour period. Helps me to not waste my quota on low value replies. It doesn’t look like everyone on the site is subject to that limit though—still trying to figure that one out... are there commenters with super powers that can ignore the 5/day limit?
You've been experiencing that because your account is rate limited. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. I've looked through your recent history and it seems fine, so normally we'd remove that restriction from your account—but you just said it was helpful, so maybe I shouldn't? You're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com if you want it removed.
I recall receiving a nudge from dang to be more charitable years ago. I'd like to think it set me in a better direction since. A small change in slope leads to a big change in y-intercept down the line, to use a math analogy.
I've grown to really appreciate his style of active moderation.
100% agreed. And for a long time, too. Back in 2015 when they banned a notorious jerk, I sent them a cookie basket. I should probably do it again, as good moderation is woefully underappreciated.
"For decades, the phrase “Eternal September” has been used to describe the tipping point for a message board or online community—the inclusion, or invasion, of new users who dramatically change the existing subculture. (The term originated in September, 1993, after America Online made Usenet, a decades-old message-board system, accessible to many of its members, who were new to the Internet.)"
Actually, it predates that; referring to when a new crop of undergraduates would arrive at schools on the Internet.
I've moderated forums similar to HN and it's a mixed bag. There are pretty much always troublesome users who deliberately look for ways to push boundaries or break rules in spirit but not in letter. Dealing with them is a huge drain and it can be really depressing to find out how many people there are going out of their way to make your community unpleasant. Or you spend half your time deleting the same racial slurs from the same 5 or 6 people who keep evading bans.
As someone who moderates and has moderated content involving a whole lot of users, it can be taxing and sometimes mind numbing when people don’t follow the rules and you get spam. I’m sure HN has spam detection and removal in its ever improving code, but there would still be a lot to handle manually when it comes to guideline violations. In my experience elsewhere, there may be cases that aren’t clear cut as to whether they’re appropriate or what the writer intended to convey. Especially on a forum where people from different cultures converge, there’s a lot of space to misunderstand and be misunderstood.
At the same time, being able to read and learn from other people’s thoughts is always a stimulating experience. It gives opportunities to develop better mental models on certain things and also be able to explain certain things better to others.
So yeah, there are pros and cons, but I wouldn’t want to do this without a few other people who can take the workload and provide a break when it gets too tiring and exhausting.
If you had a second stealth account to join discussions Im sure its plenty stimulating. But even just reading might be enough. HN is full of lurkers who spend an insane amount of time here.
edit: Im not saying the moderators have stealth accounts!
I can't say for HN, but the general answer is yes. Social systems tend to produce a lot of novel behavior, with plenty of surprising second- and third-order effects. Dealing with jerks, trolls, griefers, etc, is an arms race; they're always looking for new ways to mess things up. And the tools in this space are constantly evolving, too; for example, there's a lot of interesting ML work being done for automated content tagging.
Plus the content here is generally of intrinsic interest, and the commentary / community of sufficient quality that working in its active defense likely carries some of its own reward in the doing.
I have written comments here that could be interpreted as harshly critical of specific YC companies, and they stand or fall on their own merits and community votes, not mod bias. They do a good job here.
Risking violation of "don't feed the trolls" here to reply: that seems unnecessarily harsh. FTR I'm not downvoting you any further, but responding in case you have more specific and articulate criticism to level.
If you're going to make this sort of accusation, you should link to the thread so people can make up their own minds. With linkless insinuations, the actual story is usually significantly different from what is being insinuated.
The problem with astroturf accusations is that they are all flamebait (even if true), off-topic meta noise (the point stops being discussed in favor of the commenters), and worst of all unfalsifiable (how do you prove you're not a shill?). I've been spending a lot more time on political boards as of late, and I've yet to see accusations along these lines be even a net neutral. On balance, they're always bad.
I've been confronted by Dang a long while ago in an account I lost the access to since. I was hurt, but it was also a very educative experience.
Most of my life has been spent moderating online communities. Needless to say why, I am trying to mimic the style of moderation I have been on the receiving end of.
Oh really? I'm curious, I've kept all the emails. Did you read those emails, and if so, how? Do you know why I was rate limited?
The thread he referred to wasn't actually one I started. I made one comment in it. dang stated that "I'll try to give you more of a response later when I have time", but this never eventuated.
Incidentally, it was a very difficult time of my life, so I was genuinely reaching out to find out what I had done. His responses didn't help. I don't intend to comment further.
Edit: redacted a small part of this comment. It's unlikely to have been helpful, and it's unlikely the one I'm responding to would care.
Yeah, I didn't enjoy writing it either, but we're the only two people reading this subthread, so I'm not going to edit carefully. It's all a long-winded way of saying that the link upthread does a good enough job summing this whole situation.
Thank you, dang! More than anything, what makes this place a joy to frequent is the quality of the discourse. Your guiding hand is visible in the curation of both articles and comments.
Community sites like HN fall into many common pathologies. Your laser focus on avoiding those traps, and intentionally chasing positive models, has me always looking forward to loading the site and diving into the discourse.
> If you read the profile the New Yorker published about us last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article (and it's something of a miracle of openness and intelligence that she was able to get past that—the shock experience really is that bad).
I suppose I should clarify that that was not based on anything Anna said to us. It was just my interpretation of (my memory of) what she wrote. So anybody can read the article and decide whether they agree.
> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness.
Not that I disagree with the characterization, but the New Yorker criticizing other people for performative erudition is the funniest thing ever.
I find that NH is a great jumping off point for adventures I didn't even know I wanted to take. For instance, in this story I learned that some people can down-vote, and a lot of work is done in the background to keep goofballs like me from derailing things.
I too would like to thank the moderators.
Further, and more interestingly to me, I learn that HN is written in a LISP variant called ARC... I've never understood LISP, and especially never thought that anything useful could be built with it... at least at the subconscious level, yet I know AutoCad and Emacs are built around it. I have similar feelings about Prolog, which I tried once and just didn't grok.
There are several IDEs for specific Lisps, like Dr Racket or the Lispworks implementation of Common Lisp. There's also Emacs, which is kind of like a Lisp-based IDE, and Slime is a really good Common Lisp plugin for it.
I tried Portacle, and my experience was utter frustration. Once you go astray, there's no way to know what is going on. It threw me into so sort of debugger, with no obvious way out.
Lispworks looks like exactly what I want, except it seems to be in the Delphi business model, thus I can't afford it.
DrRacket looks better... but it doesn't seem to be lisp?
I thank you for the lifeline. If only Borland had made TurboLisp back in the day.
HN reminds me of ye olde days of Usenet, where you browsed sci.space and learned orbital mechanics, or comp.lang.c or x.y.z just for fun.
The content isn't always enlightening, but most of it is, or at least intelligent and thought provoking.
Twitter is fine for following individuals, lwn.net for Linux specific stuff, even slashdot on occasion, although slashdot often ends up being a repeat of the stories that are here.
I only have two doors to enter the web each day: HN and Twitter.
On Twitter, I try hard do a better job moderating content by carefully selecting who to follow; however, much noise is unavoidable. (Twitter needs to rethink itself)
On the other door, this door, I ALWAYS end up in the right spots. This is the best site on the web, no doubt. Here I discover, I learn, I get inspired. I get downvoted too :)
Moderation is the hardest, most subjective problem on the internet today. Plus, it doesn't scale well. Part of me wonders if the way we design the forums themselves lend itself to this problem. Is there a way to design forums so that the need for moderation is lessened or unneeded? I think the answer is no, but I'd like to think it's yes.
I'd like to think that too—it would be so much easier—but I'm pretty sure the answer is no, and I think I know why. It's because the moderation problems are all traceable back to the fundamental things we struggle with as human beings. Pain and misunderstanding in relationships, mostly.
I do still have one optimistic belief about this, which is that groups have a kind of consciousness (call it culture) and that this can develop over time, and get more organized. To the extent that that happens, moderation is not needed so much. Moderation is there to try to provide the organization that the group can't do for itself, so it's always a substitute and not a very good one.
You remind me of Bucky Fuller's trim tab metaphor:
> Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.
> It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab.
Funny enough, listening to the narrator's voice gave me an impression of very serious and somewhat condescending note. Personally, I do not consider HN in that way.
I think about HN as a place where we share ideas, playful place regardless of how complex a topic is.
The main point is to put in the spotlight ideas, not people. Attacking an idea is ok, attacking people is not.
Maybe Dang will never read this, but I appreciate the patience and logical (useful and firm) directions he gave when I stepped outside the posting rules for HN.
Thanks Dang, I actually learned something from how you dealt calmly with a random internet poster.
Dang's done a super great job, especially recently with some huge threads related to the election.
I would like to raise one point that's tangentially related: why is it not easier to find a page explaining the community guidelines ? AFAIK you have to look them up yourself.
The navbar has links to new, threads, past, comments, ask, show, jobs and submit, but none of them even give a clear redirect link to get to the guidelines ... wouldn't it make sense to add them to nav, or configure the site such that they're displayed the first time you visit ? Always seemed a bit funny to me from a design perspective.
Oh, indeed. Never seen them, but I think I never paid attention to any footer so far, so maybe they could be more highlighted.
On the other hand, like usual, the people who should read them the most, are probably the least likely to do so. Also the forum is somewhat self-regulating now?
I read quite often, when someone misbehaves, others chime in and ask them nicely to not do that here.
I really appreciate @dang for such an attentive hard work. He definitely deserves kudos. But here's the rub. You will not see this post. I have been secretely ghosted out so all my comments goes to bottom no matter how thoughful or informative it may be. There is no way for me to de-ghosted. He or other mod probably did this to me for some reason I don't even know or remember. The moderation at HN is like life sentense that you don't even know why and when you got it and then cannot be challanged.
We can see you. Also, commenters that are actually shadowbanned (which is a thing that happens, to be clear) show up to users who choose to have them appear. These users can “vouch” for your posts if they look reasonable and get you unbanned. So you’re not completely out of luck if you end up in such a situation.
Also, usually asking the moderators though email works as a way to get your questions answered.
They basically do account downweighting for people they don't like. Just make a new account with clean cookies and if you are using the same IP check your comment visibility from other IPs from time to time, as they record which accounts were on which IP and might invent some other bullshit measure against you in the future as more people become aware of the downweighting.
I don't think I've read as many comments as I have on this thread and neither have I read every line of any other New York Times article as diligently!
This is a truly amazing place. I know there are some haters out there, (your ngates and your shithnsays's), but HN is a truly unique board, with overall quality discussion, and a high SNR, and the moderation policy is a huge part of all of this.
So seriously, thanks dang. I think we've come to blows a few times, probably even not-so-kind ones, but whatever you're doing here works and you should probably keep doing it :)
HackerNews is my go to place for any type of tech question. Recently, I had RSI because of related sports injury. I learnt VIM shortcuts, bought Microsoft Egonomic keyboard and logi mouse based on suggestions here.
I am learning tones of stuff on technologies that I use daily.
I really wish I had like-minded friends in real life who are hackernews fans. Hit me up if anyone currently in or visits Dubai, UAE.
Well, when I got my first meaningful job as a software engineer I made sure to come here and thank the awesome people of HN - I usually talk to Dang, but I'm sure everyone is nice.
I have vanished from several places like twitter, reddit, linkedin... HN is the place I come daily to read the news and often share my personal projects.
Thanks Dang - and everyone else - I sure appreciate you.
Obviously, to echo everyone else's sentiments, I'm grateful for dang and tbh the hn community at large.
But one thing I keep thinking back to is the abysmal discussion of the Event Horizon Telescope black hole pictures. I think they were shown around the time of this interview. I remember for the first time the threads on hn felt unmoderated or overwhelmed [1]. Like someone sucked all the air out the room, metaphorically speaking. I don't mean this as a criticism of dan or anyone else behind hn (you can even see he was actively trying to flag the worst offenders), but I just wonder what it was like behind the scenes for hn that day, how prevalent that sort of thing is, how concerned mods should be of that sort of thing in the future, etc.
It is also lonely work to be commenting on Hacker News on pages that do not make the front page.
Anyhow, for dang and stcb (founder market fit!), I believe, with abuse in online communities on the rise, is an opportunity to dust up that YC application (stamp of approval!) and apply with a startup idea that can be repeatably (software eating the world!) sold to other companies grappling with this problem (product market fit!) unless they agree to a merger (acquihire by Stripe incoming!). Mark my words, this is going to happen someday.
When I first discovered HN, it was like a breath of fresh air compared to Reddit etc.
I have since lost faith.
HN likes to masquerade as some sort of upscale establishment, high and above the petty squabbles of Eslewhere, but in the end this place too devolves into a predictable echo chamber just like the rest of them, when it comes to any topic on which people have varied opinions.
This is not a place for dissenting views (such as this comment). This community does not brook any disagreement, because this service is not designed for it.
This did not happen overnight; for more than a year I have been watching perfectly fine comments getting buried in the gray for not siding with the prevailing mob on divisive topics. Even neutral, soft-spoken stances get struck down.
One can now reliably predict what the majority of comments are going to be like, just by reading the title of a post.
I've brought this up several times with dang, but apparently you're not able to appreciate these problems until you try participating as a regular user.
And let's not even mention the awful UI design with its vendetta against eyes, low light and small screens.
HN is broken, and one of the major indicators of a broken service is a tone-deaf management who continues to insist that everything is Working As Intended.
HN likes to masquerade as some sort of upscale establishment, high and above the petty squabbles of Eslewhere, but in the end this place too devolves into a predictable echo chamber just like the rest of them, when it comes to any topic on which people have varied opinions.
This isn't a place where dissenting opinions get upvotes. Why should they? I think a fair of posters with plenty of karma are still willing to post things that get massively downvoted and cause a reaction. I'm getting better at it. I keep a mental model of how I've reacted to HN, look at the page - "there's the reaction, down five or ten points", "hmm, I'm guess down and up votes balanced", "ah, that was a crowd pleaser".
I don't think hn is more broken than America or the Internet or whatever.
> I don't think hn is more broken than America or the Internet or whatever.
But HN wants to be different, with its quirky rules like not being allowed to downvote posts and replies, or needing a certain amount of karma to be able to downvote comments, and the time limits on edits etc., instead of just following the basic Reddit model.
So clearly someone at HN thought that a simple free-for-all system wasn't good enough, prone to abuse, and decided to make some changes, but HN isn't good enough either; it's still too easy for 3-4 downvoters to prevent thousands of people from seeing a comment they don't want to be seen.
It's too easy to suppress a side or view with fewer supporters here.
One thing HN should have borrowed is how some subreddits don't show a post/comment's score until N hours have passed.
If votes don't affect a comment's visibility for a while then everybody may have a chance to be heard. For more severe violations like spam or harassment, there's always the Flag button.
This did not happen overnight; for more than a year I have been watching perfectly fine comments getting buried
There's a pandemic on. Voting has been a bit wonky this year, probably because of the pandemic. People are cranky and scared and yadda.
But normally HN is much more tolerant of dissent than most online spaces, assuming it's done right. Rants that call other members names or that implicitly or explicitly suggest "This will be downvoted because you are all bad people" or similar is not how to do that.
> Rants that call other members names or that implicitly or explicitly suggest "This will be downvoted because you are all bad people" or similar is not how to do that.
That kind of polarization does not just happen for no reason; people reach that frustration after repeatedly seeing themselves and others being downvoted anyway, no matter how flowery and sugared their dissent is.
Downvoters don't care how polite someone is, if they're saying something they don't want to be seen. It's a zero cost action for them, and easily lets them control what opinions other readers see about a topic.
Example: In every thread about browsers, if most people say they dislike Edge, anyone simply saying "Hey I like Edge, it's not so bad" gets downvoted.
So after a while that Edge user will be preemptively defensive the next time they voice their opinion, if they even feel like participating anymore.
I'm pretty polarizing. I am quite the magnet for controversy.
HN is a place I spend a lot of time because the culture here is reasonable.
To me, saying "Hey I like Edge, it's not so bad" is pointless shit-stirring. It's looking to start trouble for no real reason.
It's a low value comment. The guidelines actively discourage that, so it's not surprising that it would be downvoted, having nothing to do with "disagreeing" per se.
If you have something meaty and thoughtful to say that disagrees with the majority view, the HN crowd will give you a fair shake. Jumping into the midst of a discussion where everyone is saying "This is junk!" to say "Well, I like it!" isn't thoughtful or meaty.
Reddit is like an average high school, full of dumb kids, who dont take anything seriously and who put a facade of competence to hide their lack of experience.
HN is like an Ivy League freshman class. Most of the kids are smart, opinionated and sure they will rule the world some day.Many have some pretty nice accomplishments. But you scratch below the surface and you will notice they are also just a bunch of kids: insecure,especially about their intelligence,they take themselves way too seriously, love one-up each other and beyond their close area of knowledge they have painfully naive//cliche views.
Dont take this site too seriously, especially since in the last 2-3 years it has been infested with "guerilla marketers"
Consider that HN is a tool to measure how dissenting your views actually are with the crowd that you are interacting with.
This is useful in a time where taking some stance can cost you your job or career, even years down the line.
However, it's unfortunate that instead of showing up- and downvotes, negative-scored comments turn grey. There is no distinction between a universally disliked comment and a controversial comment.
> for more than a year I have been watching perfectly fine comments getting buried almost instantly.
Apart from an obvious problem of too many people having downvoting privileges, mods here also silently downweight some accounts even though they leave perfectly good comments. So there are two parts of this problem: mods being assholes towards some people regardless of their comments and mods letting too many people downvote comments. Same problem with flagging, except that flagging doesn't just make some discussions taboo, it also provokes mods to come up with a reason to issue a warning to silence such discussions even more if they feel like it.
But let's be honest, HN was never a place for dissenting views or "intellectual curiosity" as they used to say, it was always a very US, Silicon Valley capitalist-owned place, where the mods, YC tried to push people into one or another direction, push people to think certain way, suppress and disallow some viewpoints under various pretenses. I'm sure you've seen them claim guidelines breaking of people expressing some views, but never the opposite views if the views happened to be a common SV ideology (for example, I don't think I've ever seen an "let's ban sexist words" diversity activism being warned as "ideological flamebait" or such activists being banned, but it did happen with people holding the opposite views, just like it did with the guy from Google). All of this nudges people into echo chambers.
I'll add that it used to have more technical discussions a few years ago, but not so much anymore, you have to go to lobsters and reddit for that, even if they suck, they are at least still there.
HN is broken, but you won't get anyone here to agree with this comment because of where you are. They don't like the truth here just like most places don't like the truth.
Thanks Dang for all your hardwork in maintaining HN to be a wonderful and sane place in internet. I always worry and wonder how HN can stay this way in future. I hope you, Sam, and other moderators write a journal of your thoughts, all the lessons learned in moderating HN.. that could help future moderators.
Props to the Mod Squad. What they're doing is working. An army of bots couldn't do it better. Never underestimate the power of anthropogenic cognitive input, a.k.a. people thinking about stuff.
You're not alone. We read and learned so much from you. And your moderation makes our knowledge hunt simpler. I'm wondering what would be your next milestone to make HN more useful?
The next big milestones are to finish a new Arc implementation that should help with our performance issues—I've been stuck on that forever. And then to build the next version of the API.
I appreciate dang's moderation. It's generally fair and doesn't discriminate based on viewpoint. Flame wars are pretty tame here and usually devoid of personal attacks.
I get it, thanks. Instead, Could you write about them, rather than the code? I'm picturing lessons learned, don't try ABC it's a waste of time, and so on..
The one thing I did notice in the article is that there is a a forum dedicated to outrageous things HN says. I mean, I always knew this is a public forum and whatnot, but I thought it has less mainstream appeal, which is the reason the conversation don't devolve easily into name calling if fallacies don't work ( or fallacies are called out for what they are ).
Can you elaborate on identifying people? I typically try to keep things sufficiently vague, but I also do hold somewhat strong opinions on a few subjects.
I do think that there is room for ML/NLP tools to be useful but we haven't done much with that yet.
Probably looking through the flagged comments is the least favorite, as well as most repetitive and time consuming manual activity, for all the mods who do it.
I don't flag comments often, but I'll be even more careful now when I do if that's the case.
Suggestion: when flagging a comment, allow the flagger to state which guideline they think the comment violates (I believe both reddit and FB do this).
It’s easy to flag submissions by accident and I’ve definitely done that and had to unflag them. I flag submissions on purpose fairly often when I feel they are really poor quality, spam, or way off-topic for HN. I also flag submissions where the discussion has gone off the rails.
Flagging a comment takes extra work because you have to click through to the comment. I’ve never done that by accident and tried to only do it for comments that violate guidelines. Sometimes I subjectively feel a comment is trolling and will flag it. That’s not strictly against the guidelines and is a judgement call.
(The worst is when I accidentally hide a story. That’s way too easy to do and too hard to undo.)
Having the hide link right next to "N comments" makes it really easy to tap by accident. Then to unhide, you have to click through to your preferences to get to the "hidden" link.
Reddit uses this order:
N comments | share | save | hide | give award | report | crosspost
I guess my preference would be for HN to use a similar order:
N comments | N points by <user> <time> | hide | flag
Of course, if you make this change, half the readers will hate it and insist you change it back. :-)
I'm not sure that "flag" and "hide" need to be on the main page at all. You could show those only after clicking through to the submission?
(I should probably just switch to one of the many HN reader apps.)
So the first problem seems to be classifying user-flagged comments based on rules violations.
And if this ML labeling is successful then do all the unflagging, or whatever is the most easily automated , most frequent action, to reduce the queue for manual processing.
We can't do that yet because you're still posting too many unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. But if you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Here’s my reason: The election is over so lets have a time of healing? My entire comment history is like 10,000 up and 8,600 down if I had to wager, it’s still net positive on the community. I’ll refrain from anything political.. until oct of 2024, deal?
Now only if they published "The Lonely Work of Writing for Hacker News, only to be shadow banned or sent away with a Typing Too Fast Message After You Put in the Work"
"N-gate, a satirical Web site with the slogan “We can’t both be right” (a NAND gate is a kind of logic gate that only outputs “false” if all of its inputs read “true”), offers a weekly summary of Hacker News discussions, dubbed “webshit weekly.” The N-gate entry about a Hacker News discussion of a Times article on the crashes of two Boeing 737 airliners, in Indonesia and Ethiopia, is typical. “Discussing a pair of crashes that killed almost three hundred and fifty people,” it reads, “Hacker News can’t decide whether the failure was one of user experience or branding. Other Hackernews”—as it calls commenters—“think that this plane would have worked better if it were designed by programmers with a tendency to work late for free. A majority of the comments are Hackernews incorrecting one another about FAA regulations, avionics, and lift.”"
That's brilliant! :-D I'll have to check out N-gate.
Oh, this post? Typical newyorker puff piece, too long to read and unrelated to technology. Someone should flag it.
Making changes that reduce the need for moderation are even better.
If you were to ask yourself: how much more could we be doing with a big community of people who are mostly highly educated and technical?
Is forums in the form we've had them since 1990 the optimal medium for a community?
I don't think anyone would say yes and yet I don't see any effort on behalf of the people who run this place to experiment and do anything remotely interesting.
The moderators on here do an admirable job but it ultimately feels to me like they're cops who are being asked to arrest people for smoking a joint. The solution to better policing is less policing, more community via better laws, the solution to better moderation is less moderation, more community, via better use of technology.
For a place that talks about new, this place feels exactly like what I had 20+ years ago elsewhere.
Part of the need for moderation stems from people holding differing opinions on culture war topics.
Of course, this is true on any site. What bothers me about HN is that when it comes to such topics, the quality of discourse and thinking degrades so significantly from what one finds on regular topics. From my perspective, if the URL and layout/theme changed, from reading some example threads (culture war topics vs not), I'd never guess both kinds are taking place on the same site.
Of course, "people will be people", but the growing amount of polarization and vitriol online is starting to get rather concerning. I think it's fair to say that the quality of the userbase here is significantly higher than most other social media platforms, so I would be very interested in seeing if some reasonable tweaks could be experimented with to see if perhaps some approach could be found to narrow the quality gap between normal topics and culture war topics here on HN.
The main idea I've had is an experimental mode that HN could be run in for topics of this kind, just a few individual changes I can think of for such a mode:
- for downvoting, make providing a reason mandatory (pick from a list of 5 or so items)
- allow voting (up down) on more finer grained attributes (5 or so) - what those might be would require some thought, but it may be an interesting and non-harmful way to increase thoughfulness
- additional guidelines that strongly discourage:
--- stereotyping members of groups
--- mind reading
--- crystal ball gazing (using predictions of the future as rhetorical evidence in a disagreement)
--- speaking untruthfully (stating speculations as facts, and refusing to provide evidence when asked)
These behaviors are certainly frowned on if they're done "against the grain" around here, it might be a fun challenge for the majority to see what it's like to have to bite their tongues now and then. Or maybe if we were really lucky, perhaps more people would realize that a lot of the things they think are true, are often nothing more than memes, opinions/intuitions, or half-true media narratives.
Of course politics is one of the most contentious topics - always has been, always will be. The dumpster fires that are modern day Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit seem beyond rescue at this point, and mainstream journalism with its innuendo and opinion-based narratives isn't far behind. And unsurprisingly, I think it's rather fair to say that even HN has shown noteworthy decline in this regard. A common theme one often hears in these conversations is the sacredness of democracy, and how we must protect it. But if one is to mention in these threads the formerly non-controversial notion that what is actually True may have some sacredness to it as well, people seem to suddenly lose interest in the discussion.
Perhaps with some reasonable experimentation and cooperation, HN could become a place where people could once again discuss such topics with reason, logic, and truth. And if we could manage such a feat, perhaps we could also find a way to document these learnings and spread them into other social networks, perhaps lowering the amount of animosity in the world a bit in the process, altering the course of history to some degree. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and their ilk have little to gain (and much to lose) from experimenting with ways for people to get along better, so if they aren't going to do it, how are we ever going to get this country/world out of this downward spiral of anger? If no one is willing to do anything, then where is this road going to lead us in the end?
Yes, poll people who invest in YC start-ups if they'd be willing to invest in start-ups that improve upon HackerNews forums.
That should generate a few million.
Then hire somebody with a proven track record to oversee proposals for additions to existing HackerNews.
In other words, get money, then crowdsource ideas, then pay people to implement ideas with most votes, then provide beta tests, then provide HackerNews add-ons for a small fee that would cover the expenses. Run it as a non-profit.
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Has this been tried before? Is this the first time you hear of such a proposal?
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I'll throw in two more ideas - make any action taken by a moderator public, with blanked out content that is flagrantly illegal (links to child pornography)
Make it possible to dispute any moderator action for a fee, in other words move from a dictatorship to a democracy.
HackerNews need not be a dictatorship where what moderators think is good, is what's going to be enforced upon the rest.
There can be thousands of HackerNews that are filtered, sorted and moderated differently, based on people's preferences. This would be trivially made possible by asking people who'd be interested in such a service, to pay a small monthly fee.
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Trivial change - please make it possible to block specific users based on name/how long they've been registered on site for X-number of days. For example if I see someone routinely making comments I am not interested in, who does it benefit for me to continue reading their input? It only causes tension, it's like having to live with people you are fundamentally opposed to with no recourse other than leaving (no longer reading the comments section)
I predict this feature alone would decrease tensions among regular readers significantly, making your job easier.
That's not a concrete suggestion, but rather a meta-strategy for getting those. Alas, I think it would run up against hard economics super quickly. Forums like HN aren't big businesses, and efforts to make them into big businesses exert pressures under which they turn into something else. This is probably the most important thing for understanding HN, actually: it ended up in a sweet spot where it makes sense for YC to fund it without needing to pressure it. Previous thoughts about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Re "please make it possible to block specific users" - this has been on the list for a long time but I have a feeling that it may go against the community in the long run. The more I get to know HN, the more I realize how important the non-siloed property is—i.e. everyone's in one big room together and can't self-select to get away from each other [1]. Of course, that makes HN a place where we all run up against things that are not only unpleasant, but actually shocking [2]. But I think that learning collectively to deal with that—learning to tolerate what that does to our nervous systems—is core work we have to do together, to keep this place vital.
Each internet community begins with different initial conditions, and if it goes on for long enough, those initial conditions get a chance to unfold into something unique. Trying to change the initial conditions after the fact feels to me like a bad idea. It's better to find ways to live with them, and maybe to steer their consequences, like sweepers in curling.
Relatedly (since we've got you here), rather than blocking bad users it would be nice to be able to tag specific users in a way that shows up on the comment feed. For example, there are a few users whose comments consistently impress me with their depth, and whose commentary in a thread often flags a deeper conversation on a topic.
It might just be because I have a terrible memory for usernames, but it would be nice to be able to immediately see "Founder/CEO of Initech" or "Expert Bananacurist" next to the name.
It's a great idea that will probably damage the community. I do something like this privately, or did until earlier this year, when I stopped because it (a) was making it hard for me to read people's comments rather than surveil threads for specific tags and (b) really drove me to invest time in tagging people, which is unproductive since I know so little about the people commenting here and really have no business bucketing them.
Since you're soliciting them, here's a few concrete suggestions:
- Avatars. A consistent, recognizable image can go a long way from transforming a faceless internet post into something closer to a person you recognize and would hesitate to harm. With enough time and exposure, usernames can work for this (everyone recognizes when tptacek, or moxie, or you post), but avatars supercharge it. People hate changes to the site UX, so maybe put it behind a profile option that's defaulted to 'off' - then, only people who care about seeing them do. Of course, this would increase the moderation burden - people using offensive avatars, etc, but I think it could help.
- Heads on pikes. A weekly/monthly/ongoing/whatever roundup of notable bad actions which people have been moderated for. This should be limited to interesting and informative cases - not spam, piracy, CSAM, etc, but legitimate humans engaging in bad-faith actions, flame wars, etc. Having negative examples to avoid can help a community understand what is and isn't appropriate in a more concrete way than a dry set of rules. And seeing people be punished for violating those rules in a public way can have a deterrent effect. Making these public works better than just downvotes, because downvotes ultimately end up hiding content.
- Exemplars on pedestals. The obvious counterpart to negative examples is positive examples. In a way, the upvote system already does something like this, but it's not the same as officially-sanctioned recognition from the staff. A very simple approach might be to give you / other staff members (maybe even high karma users/yc founders) a button on each comment that highlights it as a positive example worth emulating - maybe changing the text color in css of the username/time stamp to show that it's been recognized.
I don't think we'd go for #1 because it's core to HN that it's a text-only site. And #2 is too shaming. We've found over the years that underpunishing people (relative to what they expect) is more effective. There's a nice user report about that somewhere in the current thread. (edit: actually several now, which is pretty cool)
#3 I think is a good suggestion though. We should have some means whereby users can exalt something good, not just flag something bad. The challenge is to make it different enough from the upvoting system so it didn't just turn into a variation of the same mechanism.
Maybe you should only be able to exalt someone once every three months, so you’d use it wisely. Otherwise it’d devolve into an annoyance like reddit’s new awards system.
The UX for paginated threads is awful. I know you want to get rid of it, but I really hope you don't, because reading through something like the 4000 comment Biden thread as a single page would be incredibly taxing, and having to go through 'more' links to get to recent content is annoying.
Long threads do need to be paginated, but I think you should consider what other forums do and add a set of page links at the top and bottom of each page. It would be slightly more clutter but you wouldn't have to remind people that paginated threads are a thing every time it happens.
I still want to just get back to what HN always used to do, which is just render the entire page fast. As long as the page loads quickly, I don't see why a 4000 comment page would be more taxing than having it spread across multiple pages - one can simply stop reading, no?
Better links for navigating around large threads is on the todo list too...
>As long as the page loads quickly, I don't see why a 4000 comment page would be more taxing than having it spread across multiple pages - one can simply stop reading, no?
Threads aren't linear - people don't read them from top to bottom like documents. Every subthread is a separate conversation which the reader may or may not be interested in, and having distinct pages makes discovery easier. Ask yourself why every other list page on the site is paginated? Why have only thirty stories listed on the front page? Why not just list every story ever posted, or every story this year, or the first thousand or hundred at a time?
And as far as "one can simply stop reading," ... yes... but this is a forum. It's primary purpose is to be read, not to demonstrate how quickly Arc can render HTML and send it up the pipe. That isn't even impressive. What is the value added by rendering a thread in a single page? How does that make the site better than pagination? What is the user getting in return for the loss in readability?
Adding User 'flair' is perhaps a viable option, where users can simply tag other users with a short description. That enables both properties - avoiding discourse you find troubling, and allowing users to highlight those that they find enlightening.
Freedom of speech works well when paired with freedom to listen. Removing content (even if only from a user's view) only deepens the filter bubbles we're being shaped by.
There's one big silo, with the people who have stayed within it, and the people who have left outside it.
There aren't very many women here, which I assume is because of how the HN conversations about issues important to women tend to play out. This isn't an HN-specific problem, it's industry-wide. But I didn't go into software until my 30s, so the gender skew of the industry feels alien and alienating to me.
I would ditch HN if I discovered another tech community which was more inviting to women. I don't care if I start to miss out on the HN-resident perspectives on gender which shock me, because there are other perspectives which are more important to me which I'm already missing out on.
There is a great deal more female participation than there used to be. It's just not obvious for various reasons, but it's something I have paid attention to over the years and used to keep private data on to some degree.
I saw this not long after you posted it. We were ordering lunch, so I didn't have the ability to reply immediately, but I also wasn't sure I wanted to reply at all.
My ex husband had some terrific saying to the effect of "That's a When did you stop beating your wife? type question." And his point was that there is a deep assumption of guilt in the framing of some questions such that it's nearly impossible to answer them well at all and not somehow get trapped into agreeing that you are guilty.
Because if your knee jerk reaction is "I haven't stopped beating my wife....(because I've never been a wife beater)", before you can get to the "I've never beaten my wife" part of your thought process, the asker will go "So, you still beat your wife. I see." and won't let you rebut that. If you try to clarify, they will jump all over that as you changing your story or something and no matter what you say, they will return to their assumption of guilt and see every single answer as additional evidence of your guilt.
Your question here concerning women and HN implicitly assumes that the mods and/or the guidelines are somehow at fault and doing something wrong, and I don't think that's the case.
I hesitate to reply at all because part of the answer in my mind is that "It skewed more male when Paul Graham was the moderator. I think Dan Gackle does excellent work and he's made good headway on the issue in the years he has been here. It just takes time to turn the Titanic around as the saying goes."
And I don't like wanting to say that because I feel like then people will infer that I am accusing Paul Graham of something and that's not remotely my intent. It's like saying "I haven't stopped beating my wife....(because I never started beating my wife, damn it!)" and knowing everyone listening is going to go "Oh...so you really are pure evil. Thanks for clearing that up."
I don't think Paul Graham is somehow "to blame" for the forum skewing strongly male. YC itself has a good track record on diversity and my impression is that they are actually really quiet about that fact.
According to something Jessica Livingston wrote, Jessica and Paul were dating and they kept batting about ideas while some company was kind of stringing her along and not quite hiring her and Paul said one night "Let's start our own company." And within a day or two he contacted his two co-founders from Via Web and asked them to get on board and they agreed to do so, but only on a part-time basis (or so I understand).
So the company actually started out fifty-percent female on day one, though it didn't stay fifty-percent female for very long, and after a few years the other half of the two initial founders retired. So it's really much more of a woman-led company than I think gets generally recognized. I think Jessica Livingston is much more of a cornerstone of YC than the world thinks. The world thinks of YC as "Paul Graham's company," even though he stepped down several years ago from an active role in running it and Jessica is still there.
I know of a VC company that was founded explicitly to fund minority-led companies (women, people of color and LGBTQ founders) and the founder of that company has said she tells her people to not apply to YC because she has a poor opinion of them. Which I find bizarre because everything I see indicates YC has a lot of partners that are women, people of color and/or LGBTQ.
I'm currently going through Startup School and both the presenters in the videos are fairly frequently not cis het white males and the live audiences for these videos are quite diverse. A lot of people asking questions have thick accents.
So my general impression is that YC has a remarkably good track record on diversity that largely goes unrecognized and I don't think HN ended up skewing so starkly male due to sexism on Paul Graham's part. All the evidence suggests he, personally, has a good track record on treating women like equals and if he didn't YC wouldn't exist at all.
I wasn't here at the very beginning. I joined in July 2009 (under a different handle) and I was really sick at the time and it took a few years for me to realize that people here were talking at me like I was "prominent" for a female member and for me to go "What the hell?" and start trying to put together data of some sort privately just to figure out how to navigate HN better myself.
So I don't actually know how HN ended up skewing so strongly male to begin with (because I wasn't here to see how that went down) and I probably have no hope of figuring out how that came to be. But I have no reason to believe it's because YC or the moderators of HN or the guidelines for HN are somehow wrong and bad and sexist and excluding women.
I think it's probably more complicated than that and probably a lot of it boils down to something I think Dan Gackle once said to the effect of "When it's raining hard everywhere, it gets wet in here too."
In other words, sexism is everywhere. It's not like HN invented it. So I think it's unreasonable to implicitly assume HN is "doing something wrong" in that regard.
I have a pretty high opinion of HN overall. I think a better question would be "What is HN doing right that it's gotten better over the years given how rampant sexism is generally in the world?"
(Yes, I know, this isn't the answer most people expect given how much I bitch about sexism on HN at times. It impacts me. I need to try to make my life work.)
> "What is HN doing right that it's gotten better over the years given how rampant sexism is generally in the world?"
I'd say pinning stories and then pinning comments at the top urging civil discussion seems to work fairly well for a broad set of controversial topics, including gender-related hot-button issues.
However, there is still so much hostility and such a strong gender skew that you even if the comments obviously violating HN guidelines get flagged, the residual of borderline commentary is still overwhelming in the aggregate.
It's possible to do more. Consider the moderation strategies used by Jezebel and TheRoot, where comments either have to be posted by someone on a whitelist maintained by staff, approved by someone on the whitelist, or approved by the person being replied to if their comment was approved. That moderation system allows those sites to keep the hostility just barely at bay, and you will read perspectives playing out in long threads on those sites which would be instantly shouted down on HN.
The cost of the system used at Jezebel/TheRoot is that it reduces the scope for debate, since only approved commenters can disagree at will — an unapproved commenter replying in disagreement will usually be ignored. Still, I wonder whether some sort of whitelisting mechanism isn't the only way to allow to allow underrepresented perspectives to develop fully.
(For what it's worth, this would also apply to certain socially conservative perspectives which tend to have a short life on HN.)
That system implicitly assumes hostility as the default norm and I think it's one of those approaches that tends to follow the Shirky Principle of keeping alive the problem it is nominally intended to fix.
I hope the mods of HN never go with such a system.
I hear this from time to time about people who have left, and obviously that matters, but it's hard to get any reliable information (let alone data) about it. Can you say more about this part though?
> there are other perspectives which are more important to me which I'm already missing out on
Thanks for taking an interest. Using women as an example again:
Women are by and large outside of the HN uni-silo, and I feel their absence keenly. The thousandth go-round on James Damore is going to play out very differently in a majority female community or a community with gender parity than it will in a mostly-male community like HN.
I don't imagine that the "powers that be" at HN wish for the community's gender skew. However, I don't think that you can counter the powerful forces at play in the wider tech industry without imposing controls on debate which you would find philosophically incompatible with HN's mission.
You've helped keep HN readable, corrected countless title and link errors, and prevented heated discussions from devolving into fights.
I also am super thankful for your help getting my "Show HN" post to the front page.
We all appreciate you.