Yea, thanks to everyone who keeps this site rolling !
So today I wanted to say thanks, on behalf of the HN community.
I appreciate the understanding, i once added a "post to HN" button to my RSS feed service and i posted too much..
I received a ban and only afterwards it seemed i was posting too much, but explained the situation and was met with understanding. Now, i'm much more considerate.
Thanks for the human moderation and keeping the quality on HN as good as possible.
Running a forum is hard work and everyone wants to devolve every mod decision into rules lawyering, like "well, then why wasn't this specific thing in the rules?"
No, there can't be a rule for literally everything, so you're just going to have to be an adult and take it on the chin when the mods make a decision and double down on it. I completely empathize with dang's final post, that your "legalistic gambit" is a waste of everyone's time, and often the platform people like to spring off some sort of "omg the mod tyranny" campaign.
That happened over 70 days ago. Maybe it's time to let it go and learn to live with the fact that your tiny comment was flagged. Looking at your post history, you've lived through much worse, respectfully.
You're going to have to live with that.
If you disagree so much, maybe it's time to go somewhere else and spare the rest of us from your permanent, belabored grudge. Like, boo hoo. Seriously. Hopefully you find something else to spend your precious time on earth worrying about.
Which probably means that what they're doing is a good thing though, not a lot of flame wars going on! (Or alternatively, I just stay away from articles that might cause need for more moderation).
But thanks! Good mods are crucial for a place like this
Here's why I remember this: no one I know in real life reads fiction. I know plenty of people who read non-fiction (political stuff mostly), but no one in my circle takes the time to just sit back on a rainy Saturday and read something someone else made up. Even my wife is reading Bob Woodward's "Fear", and we aren't even American. So yeah, that little interaction made my day.
That nobody else really cares will be a critical life lesson for you.
The thread need not be deleted anyway. Nothing wrong with thanking some of the people that keep the site running smoothly. Especially on a day dedicated to giving thanks.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
and if there's a broad community sense that moderation is particularly good here, there may be something interesting to be learned from that.
In any event, it's (American) thanksgiving and they're about the best mods I've seen!
But, when that arbitrariness always, always favors one set of viewpoints and suppresses others according to content, then in becomes a problem. That's not randomness, that's bias.
Eg: Person A says controversial opinion X, person B counters with controversial opinion Y. This can lead to a flame war. But which controversial opinion gets censored? The one the mods disagree with. And the excuse it, to prevent a flame war. Which is valid. But it's always the same side of the discussion that gets silenced by power.
The pre-judged outcome really drains the life and value from a lot of the most enervating discussions around here. I'd rather have read "flamewar" (as long as it's not personal) than an enforced echo chamber.
> pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of civility
So, thanks Dan and Scott for all the good work you do keeping the comment sections higher quality than most of the Internet. :)
And fwiw it’s pretty disgusting that people feel the need to kiss up to them all the time on HN, but it’s like supplicating before anyone with power, it’s done for a reason and it’s an ugly aspect of humanity.
Countless times I’ve seen interesting submissions buried, either by some behind-the-scenes process or via a title change that reverts to the authors boring or misleading title.
There are surely some griefers who need to be policed, but the HN mods are accountable to nobody and there is no public record of their actions which might reveal improprieties or abuse of the trust placed in them by pg and the community.
So I am thankful for any good intentions they may have, but sadly the evidence suggests that at least one of them is a bully who abuses the authoritarian power and lack of accountability.
I’m not arguing that moderation isn’t necessary, just that unaccountable and non-transparent moderation decisions are a recipe for corruption and abuse of power.
Basically, HN is run like Singapore. It’s very tidy but there is an authoritarian dimension that is unsettling. HN thrives when the mods are busy with other things and don’t have time to taze every so called flame war and “fix” every title.
Some Weirdo: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/f8/74/40/f8744035e15d69eb8fd4c70de...
Monster Jobs: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/21/81/3e/21813e975f2aa35259246eeca...
Vultures: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/e4/d2/f3/e4d2f3b47c3de90e1a084d94a...
Construction Birds at Lunch: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/3b/c5/fd/3bc5fd323e791b6879529e6a5...
Blizard's A-Comin': https://i.pinimg.com/736x/61/f9/bb/61f9bb66cc0e79f06246876ba...
The Creeps: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5a/1c/5e/5a1c5ef2e9ab19d27970...
Superman In His Later Years: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/86/95/a7/8695a7c1cfffb69bc3b92c980...
Before Paper and Scissors: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/a4/cf/ab/a4cfabe6847546e52343d4d15...
Sorry, Buddy: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/49/6b/3a/496b3a234ddeca894887b249e...
Nerd! ...: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c9/08/a0/c908a02a8dfa42db9973f743b...
The Thanksgiving themed one that I googled and googled and googled for but couldn't find, which was taped to my mom's refrigerator, was the disappointed bird standing in front of the open refrigerator, lamenting: "Dang, somebody ate the middle out of the daddy longlegs!"
Thank you for "forcing San Fransisco liberal social justice politics down everyone's throat", you "west coast liberal elite echo chamber". Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!!! ;)
So thanks to those responsible.
From the OSS (CIA) Simple Sabotage Manual: https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...
(1) Insist on doing everything through"channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make "speeches," Talk as frequently as possible and at great length., Illustrate your. points.. by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. . . .
That was an interesting comment, it's a pity it went out like this.
I have never, ever seen any online community moderated better or even remotely close to as well as HN.
I am deeply thankful for HN. It is a surprisingly important part of my life, almost solely because of them.
Thanks Dan + Scott!
1: Perhaps this one more then anything is maybe my favorite nugget:
>"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
This really does make such a different to repeat to myself. And even if the other person is not in fact acting in good faith, it doesn't hurt to try first and then disengage with reason rather then pure emotion.
And to be on topic, I'm not as familiar with sctb, but Dan's comments have always been nothing but constructive. They're never disparaging, they seem primarily to be nudges towards decent behavior. Thank you Dan!
I'll keep an eye out for you Scott ;-).
Cheers all, and happy Thanksgiving to everyone celebrating today.
It’s their site to do as they will, but it strikes me as interesting that they are held up as saints when they are anything but. Note that I’m not saying they are monsters either, but as someone on the receiving end of dang’s conduct I personally cannot agree with this post. It’s not like they are really accountable for their actions.
The right response here is simply to ask for further substantiation, as danso did. It's not clear to me that the mods are directly responsible for what you've experienced. If you haven't, I would contact them for clarification.
I think moderators are doing an excellent job to keep this forum decent and interesting.
Of course I also thank the people who make this forum and share interesting information.
I am somewhat rate limited it seems for reasons but I won't complain. I'm possibly more annoying than them.
As HN community is more and more becoming group think (watch how this post will be downvoted) and laying these extra layers of super powers punishing anyone ad hock doesn’t help. In few posts when I wrote non-popular opinion very respectfully these folks expressed their displeasure. Mods should NEVER do that.
The sign of such required moderators is indicator of how broken the algorithms driving HN. Instead of fixing these fundamental tech issues, the powers behind HN have doubled down on exercising heavy handed dictatorships. The least they could have done but never have bothered is to at least tell people they punish what they did wrong, how do they fix it and get back in community. The best they could have done would b ego open source HN and have honest discussions about various issues we have as community so more brain power is available to solve these issues. That’s the hacker way.
Update: Great! Group thinkers are already getting busy at casting downvotes.
> dang called me a troll after I simply asked him exactly what it was about my comment that warranted it being removed.
Why do you think this tiny little comment worthy of immediate massive downvotes so that no one even can upvote it any more?
Is it your expectation that people commenting here must submit themselves to popular opinion? Is diverging from group think or disagreeing with mods punishable by immediate shadow banning?
Maybe to find the issue you should pay less attention to your opinion and more to how you express it. Disagreeing with people is okay, even on the Internet there isn't always a side that's right and one that's wrong.
In fact, they remind me of Stackoverflow community.
I didn't ran into problem with sctb tho, i think he's fine. But dang, she needs tone down her impulse of over moderating everything.
I don't agree with all their methods and opinions. Most threads which hurt business are deranked and removed. Specially, the ones which discuss the dark side of the startups, after all YC has to make sure no one rocks their boat.
And the ones which discuss sexual harrasment or racism in YC Startups or Valley startups, are removed from the first page faster.
Lifestyle business threads are also removed from first page so that no entrepreneur might imagine that something is possible without VC funding.
Pretty, sure these guys get paid for their work. I don't see why should we be thankful afterall it's free market. If they don't like their job, someone else will.
The purpose of this forum is to attract talent from all around the world to silicon valley and mining the bright people who comment there for ideas for next billion dollar startup which YC guys will fund as they got those investors on their side.
Rest of us really don't benefit in material way other than probably a feeling of winning an argument on internet and raising testosterone/dopamine a bit.
Hear hear. This is by far the worst part of HN. It makes me very annoyed, more than any discussion on this site has, to see that I'm posting too fast... By having a discussion or responding to multiple people. What a horrible restriction.
HN is open source and you can see how they put a flag on your account if they think you argue too much.
edit: apparently it's updated daily, with 18,507,035 comments as of now: https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/bigquery-public-data...
It's unpleasant reading people taking out their axes to grind, especially on this page. "Boo hoo, they treat me so badly, it's a horrible place" etc.. That's why people downvote. The mods seem admirable here to me, very much so. And of course on this page you will find people who appreciate them, that's the theme of the page. No conspiracy theory needed. And most people here really like HN, don't think it's awful, or we wouldn't be here. So why are you here? If what you say is right, then life's too short to waste at a place like this, isn't it. Maybe look at what you've 'turned into'.
Yes, you're right about the moral police part, I'm trying hard to stop doing this. I try to help like this and usually just get downvoted. Plus it just adds more at-best-useless comments to the site. But it is hard not to want to refute what seem unjust, unfair accusations, of the site or people on here, when I see them. But the best answer is just to downvote and/or flag, as recommended in the guidelines, I guess. Ok bye.
Or is your point just baseless name calling and dehumanization: that you think the humans on HN behave like chimps, but you don't have any proof of that, just proof of how chimps behave?
If you just want to call people chimps, then just call people chimps and take your licks for that, but stop beating around the bushes like such a chimp.
Looks like you blew a seal!
You've seen the cartoon of course, haven't you? Of course you have, because you're acting exactly as the cartoon describes, and you are well aware of what you're doing, while pretending you don't know, and that you never heard of the term, even after it's been pointed out to you several times.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning
Now that I've given you a link and explained it to you yet again, your pretense of not knowing what we're talking about when we accuse you of sea-lioning is no longer valid, so give it up.
Failure to acknowledge that you've read the definition of that term, understand what it means, and how it perfectly describes what you're doing, constitutes an admission of guilt that you're not arguing in good faith.
Is it possible to bring up ape behavioral studies without being accused of bad intentions? What do you propose is the best way to go about it?
Suppose he is being treated unfairly by the mods. Is that not worth complaining about?
I don't give a crap about some silly "downvote every comment complaining about downvotes" rule. Complaining about downvotes was frowned upon because people get inexplicably downvoted as a matter of course here, and the frequency of complaints was deemed sufficiently detracting to warrant being frowned upon. Being treated unfairly by the mods, however, is another matter entirely.
I haven't seen a preponderance of evidence suggesting the complaint was ill-founded, and the guy's tenure and comment history (what I looked through of it) do not suggest he's an ill-mannered troll, so I reserve judgement as to whether the complaint is in the wrong. Like any reasonable person would.
Notice how that's apparently perfectly fine to say, but someone critical of something on HN would have to get lucky to be able to speak like that, as demonstrated in this thread.
Another highly selectively enforced rule.
