It's maddeningly difficult to distinguish those thin lines in oneself. I've been working on that for years and it takes all the self-awareness I have. This makes me happy that HN is small (by internet standards) because how do you scale self-awarness? It seems almost an oxymoron.

Your comment brings this out because some subset of "outrageous, silly, inflammatory, false, fake" is right on the cusp, and making those calls (to moderate or not to moderate?) puts tremendous pressure on one's own feelings and beliefs. What helps one do it neutrally is self-awareness, but that is the scarcest thing there is. It takes a decade of hard work to distill a bit more. (Edit: and I'm not claiming to have much; just that it's needed.)

I'm uncomfortable with the "false" / "fake" end of your spectrum because we don't have a truth meter. Who am I to decide what's true or false or "mis" or "dis" for anybody else? I'm not taking on that karma.

"Inflammatory" is easier to work with because it's about predictable community effects and one can moderate for community cohesion. Moderating that way ends up excluding truths that the community can't withstand, but such truths probably exist for any community. Groups may even be defined by what they exclude. We can try to stretch those limits but there's only so much elasticity available.

I blanched when I read "Moderation is the normal business activity of ensuring that your customers like using your product" in the OP, but actually that's basically saying moderation is about community cohesion and I can't disagree. But the secret agenda, on HN at least, is to stretch it.

> ... because how do you scale self-awarness? It seems almost an oxymoron.

Well, in very small doses numbers help. It is easier for a small group to watch the blind spots of each member. As the numbers scale up to serious group sizes things seem to fall apart again as a hive-mind forms.

Which means that the sensible thing to do is to form a committee of intelligent people with good incentives, then go trustingly with what they suggest. Which is, coincidentally, a successful model that governments use. All the politics is generally a distraction from the real work being done by committees.

> It is easier for a small group to watch the blind spots of each member. As the numbers scale up to serious group sizes things seem to fall apart again as a hive-mind forms.

I agree, but that's not self-awareness—that's seeing other people's blind spots, which is much easier, in fact it happens automatically.

You're right that it falls apart at scale. Somehow mass blind spots take over. Can that be mitigated? That is the question.

Group dynamics seem to change qualitatively at each order of magnitude. Maybe the problem of "social media", i.e. internet group dynamics, is that we're dealing with orders of magnitude we've never seen before. That doesn't get worked out in just 10 or 20 years.

I don't think you need excessively large groups for a mob mentality to take root.

That's true. But the interesting question is how large a group can get without that.

>As the numbers scale up to serious group sizes things seem to fall apart again as a hive-mind forms.

At the same time the hive mind is quite often a protective defense against insurgency in forms.

This seems to be a problem with the comments in this entire post. We're taking community as individuals doing individual things, and in small forums this is commonly true. But, when the group grows larger and money is on the line that assumption should be discarded. In astro-turfing for example, a seemingly large group of 'users' will direct communication on your forms via somewhat 'rational' communication, but possibly disliked by a lot of members. Then you'll notice a group that seemingly counters the astroturf to the level of absurdity that turns more 'hearts and minds' towards the astroturfers (guess what, the counter turfers were also the astroturfers).

You typically end up with one of two situations. The forum either takes on the ideas of the astroturf group and it becomes encoded in their ideals, or the fend it off, but in doing so embrace some of the extremism implanted by the astroturfing group in the first place.

Also, what happens to any group when 4chan decides to raid you for the lulz?

> HN is relatively small

...Is it? I mean, compared to Twitter, sure, but for a private forum I think of it as relatively large.

By internet standards. We're 2 or more orders of magnitude smaller than the marquee names. My guess (which I don't want to find out by experience) is that the pressure scales non-linearly, so a hundred times the users would mean who-knows-how-many-zeros more pressure.

HN feels mid-size in a good way. Most forums are a lot smaller, and then there are the few famous ones that are much much larger. There aren't that many in HN's order of magnitude. The mid range is a nice place to hang because although the problems are impossible, they're not utterly impossible. You can work with them around the margins.

How big is HN? Is there a stats page? How many users, daily visits, posts, etc.?

There's no stats page but last I checked it was around 5M monthly unique users (depending on how you count them), perhaps 10M page views a day (including a guess at API traffic), and something like 1300 submissions (stories) and 13k comments a day.

The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it.

Thanks dang. Submissions not growing could mean the the users are already finding and submitting most of the interesting stories out there, and there's not much more to find.

That's my theory too—there's a cap on interesting content.

Not only is HN small, it's focused.

Make a post about celebrities, politics, or religion (that's not tech related) and see how long before it's flagged out of existence.

I'd be happy if folks just laid off their truth-o-meters as soon as breaking news erupts. Unambiguously inflammatory comments? Please moderate away. Fake news? Please slow right down until a single research cycle has possibly completed, and evidence can be provided based on rigorous studies (which take time).

I appreciate your efforts, and I know it's not easy, even for you.

> Deleting a comment because it is insulting a person is moderation.

Moderation is far more than that. Moderation depends on context - for example, deleting a comment like "$political-party is better than their opponents" from r/programming is "against freedom of speech", but is an example of good moderation, because political discourse is off topic on that forum.

Moderation is about setting the tone and scope of discussion. For many kinds of forums, this includes deleting comments that the moderators find outrageous, silly, inflammatory, and off-topic. Removing things that don't conform to their own views is however a faux pas, moderators are supposed to be neutral in the on-topic discussions, as their name suggests. False/fake are a more complex discussion, as there is no universal source of truth of course.

Now, for a completely open forum, such as Twitter or Facebook, moderation doesn't really make sense, since no discussion or tone is off-topic a priori (except of course for removing illegal speech).

But blocking political speech equally from one subreddit, is different then say blocking an article about a presidential son's laptop from multiple entire platforms.

As I said, I don't think this concept of moderation works when applied to an open discussion forum such as Facebook or Twitter, where nothing is actually off-topic, and where people generally feel that they are communicating with friends and followers and can thus set any tone their own community accepts.

But still, if the Hunter Biden laptop story were removed from the Linux Kernel Mailing List, from StackOverflow and from LWN.net (entire platforms), I wouldn't accuse these particular platforms of censorship.

"Obeys freedom of speech"? What does that mean? Particularly, what does it mean outside the US? I don't think Scott's definitions are great, but they're at least cutting across the right axis.

What about deleting a comment because it's off topic or goes against some arbitrary guidelines set up by the site moderator?

> Deleting a comment because it is insulting a person is moderation. Deleting a comment because you don't like it, it doesn't conform to your views or you find it outrageous, silly, inflammatory, false, fake is censorship.

I can't help but think this comes down to, its censorship if i disagree, moderation when i agree.

If someone posts something like "Elon Musk is an idiot", would deleting it be censorship or moderation? Musk is a person after all, but i suspect that many people would say deleting such a thing is censorship.

To give a more realistic to hacker news example - if there was a story about some company reselling modified GPL software for profit without following the gpl license, i would probably call them "bad" people. This is clearly an insult. I still think it would be a reasonable comment to make (hopefully a bit more fleshed out then just calling them evil of course).

What if I delete insulting comments because I don't like them?

The problem is usually consistency.

Moderators will delete comments or ban people for insults against people they like/support, but then cheer on more aggressive insults against people they deem bad (it's suddenly become very trendy to lash out at Elon Musk on Reddit, for example - you'll score upvotes rather than subreddit bans for doing that)