Question for the mods:<p>In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a><p>> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.<p>But I’ve seen more types of TV news stories going through, like stories about political protests, stories about politics in Eastern Europe, free speech debates, etc.<p>Without getting into the details of each particular submission I’m curious if you think the submission standards have remained consistent throughout the years or if your curation philosophy has changed at all and if so, in what ways?<p>P.S. Thanks for all you do as mods and for making HN an a valuable and unique community. It’s awesome to go to a thread and see helpful links or comments that enhance the conversation.
I've noticed that all the online spaces I enjoy visiting are heavily moderated. Whenever I get linked to "free speech" loosely-moderated platforms, I usually hit the back button pretty quick.
I'd just like to say "thank you" to the moderators for helping make Hacker News such an interesting site. I've been reading Hacker News for years and it's really helped me keep on top of emerging trends in technology! Sometimes I've seen tech news hit Hacker News before even the major news outlets have a chance to report. It's pretty impressive. Keep up the good work!
I appreciate the repost. It's quite timely for me, because I had recently been reading and participating in a post about HN's apparent toxicity. This has helped me to gain some more perspective on the topic. Especially about how moderation is done. I'm really impressed by the moderators, I honestly had no idea how many people were moderating HN or how they did things. I admire the patience and care it sounds like they put into the community.
I mostly appreciate the mods (well, dang is the only one I've interacted with) but I'm pretty tired of being scolded for occasionally making one-sentence comments that lack substance, while in the meantime, the site tolerates people who write pages of absolutely untrue covid vax denialism but don't get any comments from the mods.<p>At this point I'm actively looking for a replacement community that focuses much more on ML and Linux, and not on the social issues associated with machine learning, or social justice warriors messing up tech firms, or people who seem to get their "science" from Fox News.
There should be little badges, like employees at nuclear power plants wear, except if you exceed a certain threshold of online discourse you are quarantined in a wifi free zone until you have decontaminated. Irl most people oti are not as weird or insane as you would guess from interacting with them, the exceptions are those driven insane by internet dscourse.<p>Tldr Hacker News is seriously the worst moderated forum with the worst posters, except for all the other ones.
Good ol Dang, hero to some, voice of reason to others [1]<p>[1] <a href="http://cosmonautdreams.com/images/dang.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://cosmonautdreams.com/images/dang.jpg</a>
I've gotten lit up by dang a few times - and I usually disagree with his criticism, though in retrospect he's probably correct - but I've always been impressed with his dedication to this site. It takes a lot for someone to be a moderator, especially with the amount of text coming through this site. I've often wondered if was actually an AI that gained sentience yet doesn't realize that he's an AI.<p>> Gackle, whose name is pronounced “Gack-lee” and who declined to share his age, is a muscular, bald, and loquacious father of two and a devoted fan of the Canadian sketch-comedy show “The Kids in the Hall.”<p>So... an AI that can do deepfakes as well? Amazing.
2019. Original discussion:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052</a>
> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative ...<p>Reading this, I felt the description hit very close to home with regards to a substantive amount of discourse here. I also learned a new word!
Past comments: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048415" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048415</a>
Regarding the throwaway accounts, I wish there was some way to delete old comments. I think I have the moral right to control their lifetime, and occasional gaps in 5 year old discussions will not really matter to anyone.<p>Without such an option the logical alternative is to periodically cycle your username, amassing somewhat of a sockpuppet army if you are so inclined.
The secret that nobody tells you about HN is that it's not moderated by dang and sctb, but by dang, sctb and all users. In a sort of emergent way by users, of course, because we just downvote the kinds of comments we don't want to see (and some probably actively look out for comments that break the site guidelines) and upvote the ones we want to see. Hence the constant chatter about the "hive mind" etc. I guess. If you have a large body of users up- and down-voting what they think is right/wrong behaviour there's going to be _some_ tendencies that come out on top in every thread, and perhaps in the site as a whole. But that's not to say that what these top-tendencies are won't fluctuate wildly, even in the same day.<p>It's complicated. A simulation would be interesting.
This nearly brought me to tears. dang and Scott's story was really moving. The humanistic approach, the amount of work to make this website so good. Falling off a mountain and realizing you need a job & need to give up on your startup... novel-worthy stuff.
Question for the mods (@dang):<p>Do you not experience some kind of information overload from monitoring all those stories and comments on HN? How are you able to handle all of that?<p>Otherwise I just want to say thank you for maintaining this forum and making sure it stays interesting.
Long read but it worth every letter written, well done!<p>A few bullets..<p>1. Does the moderators use some form of automation to extract suspicious posts/comments or they go manually scanning all posts with the full threads? I'm just finding it to be extremely difficult to monitor 24/7 manually.<p>2. It's really an interesting story this "SkySheet" and just heard about it.<p>3. I believe this article would be of another level if it was recorded as a podcast where we can hear their natural voices in a live discussion.<p>4. Am I the only one who find it extremely difficult to understand why [some] HNewsers don't and, won't follow the site guidelines, go blind and write whatever will fill this gap in their ego?!
In this site I've learned to be careful of what I write on the internet. I keep returning because almost everyone follows the same rule: write if you have something interesting to say politely, otherwise read and move on. It's quite the opposite of other famous communities (except for some subs on reddit) where everyone is fighting for karma points with memes and copycat comments or evidently pushing their agendas.
Thanks to you dang and to everyone involved for moderating such an interesting place.
One thing that puzzles me is why HN does not have a policy of banning users who post explicitly racist comments. I sometimes (unwisely) get sucked into arguing with these people. However, this is essentially impossible to do within the site guidelines, as you either have to have a respectful discussion with a racist (which only legitimizes them) or call them out for being a racist (which isn't allowed). I'm aware that racist comments often get flagged, but then again, they also often don't. And users who post such comments are able to continue contributing to the site.<p>I won't post links to examples here because, again, that is probably not within the site guidelines. But I'm happy to supply on request.
"to make space for a more inclusive, wider-ranging vision of technology"<p>What on earth does this mean!?<p>Hacker news will probably go the way of Reddit, steady decline in quality, and everything infected with politics.
Loved this.<p>A peek behind the curtain, and what I see is what I expect.<p>What a fantastic job you all (both? still?) do.<p>Truly anarchism in action. A wonderful thing. Nothing should last foever - long may you run!
This thread gave me the sudden urge to backdate HN on WebArchive.<p>What's amusing is the post on the front-page:
"Web 2.0 is a bubble for 3 reasons" yet seeing the same for Web 3.0.<p>HN from 2007 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/https://news.ycombinator.com/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/https://news.ycomb...</a><p>Edit: Strange downvotes...
> In an Emacs file, Gackle collects a list of contradictory statements that people have used to describe Hacker News.<p>dang, could you please describe your Emacs setup?
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