PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

The problem is that as a moderator those type of posts get your attention. The outliers are the ones you worry about. As someone who participates I basically ignore those. There will always be complain posts even when everything is perfect. People might have had a bad day or there might be another reason for their reaction.

They are outliers in intensity only. They are not outliers in terms of the underlying phenomenon of how users arrive at their generalized perceptions of HN. On the contrary, the phenomenon itself is routine and typical. I would even call it universal.

If you see a comment complaining about "(Apple|Google|Microsoft) fanboys", that's much the same thing. The only actual information in such a comment is about the commenter—specifically, what they dislike (in this case, (Apple|Google|Microsoft)) and therefore what they notice and assigned greater weight to.

Such commenters routinely produce entirely opposite outputs about the exact same input set. Indeed their complaints are interchangeable except for the direction of bias they're complaining about. This phenomenon is so reliable that I'm not sure I've seen any more reliable phenomenon on HN. There is clearly a deep cognitive bias underlying it. I've done my best to try to explain what that is. I'd be interested in hearing other explanations, but so far most responses seem to deny the phenomenon, which from my perspective can't possibly be correct.

Where I think being a moderator makes a big difference is that we get bombarded with these contradictory complaints every day, often in personally abusive ways. You can't help but notice the contradictions when you're getting bashed for one reason one minute and than bashed for exactly the opposite reason the next. When one side calls you Hitler and the other side calls you Stalin, and each side complains bitterly how you ban everyone they agree with and moderate in the other's favor, the only sane response is to become curious about how the exact same thing can result in such an extreme variance in perception.

> When one side calls you Hitler and the other side calls you Stalin, and each side complains bitterly how you ban everyone they agree with and moderate in the other's favor, the only sane response is to become curious about how the exact same thing can result in such an extreme variance in perception.

As another commentator has said, being a moderator means you only see a certain side of the equation. Users don't see the amount of abuse or nonsense that gets thrown at moderators because a lot of that is invisible or removed, that's just the unfortunate nature of running a forum. Even worse when it devolves into threats or actions against moderators.

But it also blinds you to the smaller shifts in the userbase because the larger conflicting voices are the main thing you hear. It becomes harder to notice when women feel less comfortable posting here because other posters chase them off. Or when minorities have trouble sharing their experiences because any mention of their race triggers a flamewar.

That ends up cultivating a certain level of bias on the forum where only individuals who either silently agree with or add fuel to the fire rotate in and other users rotate out. I mean I've fought with you before because you had to remove the word 'Black' from a story because it caused some users to lash out at the fact that black people were sharing their story.

You did so in order to stop a flamewar, but why did you need to do so in the first place? If a small subset of users can poison a discussion as a result, then you have a problem with the overall bias of the forum.

There are lots of different small subsets of users who can poison or destabilize the system, and yes, that is a huge problem with the forum. It doesn't follow that any such subset dominates the site's overall userbase. Each certainly believes that the opposite subset does, though. That's the phenomenon I'm trying to describe.

It's not true that what I'm arguing for or perceiving is based only on extreme comments. I tried to explain this in the very comment you replied to. It's based on massive numbers of comments, some extreme and most not. I probably read more of this forum than anyone, for the simple reason that it's my job. I've also spent thousands of hours working on evaluating it as objectively as I possibly can. That does not mean my perceptions are correct or that I'm immune from bias; au contraire. But it's not nothing either.

Based on feedback I've gotten and posts I see, I don't believe that women feel less comfortable posting here than they used to. I believe there has been a slow trend in a better direction, though not everyone agrees. Race is a harder issue to assess because that issue has flared up so massively in society at large lately that the macro trends simply dominate whatever is specific to HN. We can't expect this site to be immune from that.

The question I would put to you is how do you guys maintain zen?

Sure HN isn't as bad as some places on the web, but tech still has its subcultures, blind spots and tribes - not to mention politics.

The biggest strain is mod burn out in many places, or even mods getting influenced by the content they police.

Do you guys have any plans or issues like that?

Sure, that's by far the biggest issue in my working life and therefore one of the biggest in my life. My approach is to try to take it as an opportunity for growth. I've spent a lot of time with forms of therapeutic process work that have affected me deeply and which overlap in some ways with the challenges of moderation. I sometimes imagine that there is also a spiritual aspect of sorts (I hesitate to use that word because it sounds inflated in an internet comment, but you touched on something similar when you said 'zen')—something that allows for an intense and crazy-making situation to perhaps be a catalyst if you use it in the right way.

Two simpler factors are (1) I'm paid to do it and (2) I have creative freedom, which is important to me. Just remembering those two things reminds me that I'm choosing to do this. That sounds so trivial but psychologically it's a big thing.

No I can see why it works for the situation you are in. It's sort of artisinal work in this case. Plus the act of moderation and just speech online is nearly 0 steps removed from they original techie ideals of exchanging and encouraging good ideas.

Plus its HN, so the mission is matched by positive history within the community.

Part of the reason I ask is because the handling of the mental costs of such a job is not something covered in the content/research on moderation. We know that employees at firms get PTSD for example, but that's also from staring at the highest levels of radioactive content. Those people need therapy.

For something much milder (hopefully), what do mods do to make peace with things and not lose their minds?

Somehow it is popular to adhere to binary thinking.

Eg.

- For operating systems: only apple is good, the rest is bad.

- For politics: choose a side

Also the "if you are not for me, then you are against me" kind of trope.

That's just how it is, I don't think you can change that.

Some people have made their mind up and are only willing to make you change your mind and not listen to any reason from another point of view.

Then there's the abuse.

Where somebody is no longer debating a topic, but start getting personal. That's almost always a sign of acting in bad faith. Those are the type of posts that have a likely hood of needing some moderating. Once somebody like that pops up, they are likely to have crossed a limit that makes them easier to show up on your radar. Sometimes it is an accident, but other times it is a pattern.

It can be interesting to know why somebody acts like that, but perhaps it is better to not know that. Especially when they are not willing to change their behavior.