I thought I clicked the wrong thing at first. In case an explanation helps: this is another comment thread where dang (HN's moderator) has a long and deep conversation about HN and why it is the way it is.
Great comment by @dang downstream in that thread. I missed it the first time around. Thanks @jackquesm!
My little bit to add here, for what it's worth. (I've been here since the first few months or so). Good conversations don't have to involve a back-and-forth with your ideas always being involved. In huge groups of people, many times I find it good enough to try to add something useful to the discussion, provide a link for more depth if necessary, and then shut the hell up. It's not the "me" show.
I post stuff I've created all of the time here that doesn't get traction. As the old saying goes, thems the breaks, kid. Every now and then some oddball thing I've said or posted will take off, and that's a pretty cool feeling, but I learned not to chase that feeling. Instead just try to be a decent and respectful participant and delete more content before you hit the "send" button than you actually post. The rest of it is pretty much effectively random. (Insert discussion here about how some folks have such a good reputation that it doesn't matter. I don't like it. Many of them don't like it. But it is what it is)
> Quite a few HN users, including some of the most prominent ones (and some of the best writers too), started off with a pugnacious commenting style and learned over the years to modulate that in the interest of curiosity, both in themselves and others. That's the learning curve we all have to go through here, and are still going through.
Not saying I'm prominent or a great writer, but here's an example from my own posting history showing two comments with the same general message, but the first one done in an unnecessarily provocative and condescending way, and the later one done after learning how to tone things down:
> Good conversations don't have to involve a back-and-forth with your ideas always being involved.
That's a great point. Generally my favorite part of the comments are all the little atomic nuggets of wisdom that folks post in one-off comments that are just tangentially related to the topic. To be honest I find most of the "conversation" threads to be tiresome as the typically just consist of 2 or 3 people talking past each other until the thread peters out.
Forum moderation is... fascinating complex. Because not only do you have a complex immediate system: you have a complex system with memory (i.e. individual posters stick around).
As a consequence, moderation (the verb) has tons of second+ order effects, as all interventions ripple out into future posts and attitudes. Sometimes in an opposite way to what you intended with your intervention (e.g. so angry about being moderated that my next three comments are written in anger).
> The problem with provocation and flamebait is easy to derive from first principles: you can't provoke or flame others into curiosity. (dang)
As clear a description of "why" as I've seen. And the statistical argument is a good one, because moderators never control who shows up. [0]
If a comment has a 60% chance of attracting a flame in response, then that comment is dangerous to the forum as a whole, and a responsible commentor will write it to decrease that as much as possible.
Personally, I find myself paring down my comments to minimal kernels, when commenting on hot button topics, because any excess verbiage is a potential target for a flame to notice and attach to.
[0] My quintessential example of this was putting in hours of moderating a touchy topic on the EVE forums, IMHO doing a decent job getting every calmed down, with good feelings all around, only for some jackass to pop into the thread for the first time with a borderline (non-moderatable) comment that lit everything back on fire. "I am Jack's broken heart", indeed.
Do you know how many writers are boring? Most people don’t read books. The books are boring, the awful writers became authors of books. Truly dreadful and boring writers. I don’t think people realize why people gravitate to ‘flammable’ writers on the internet. It’s the most interesting shit they ever read, literally, ever. Can we respect that on some level?
only for some jackass to pop into the thread for the first time with a borderline (non-moderatable) comment that lit everything back on fire.
My dear friend, I suffer from serious depression, and whatever chaos one person can create with words is pure joy to me. Do not moderate my happiness.
I'm going to use the adjective "flammable" now to describe people who can be easily riled up into political rage. It's great because it emphasizes that not only is there a match, there's tinder.
@dang - big thanks for all you do to help keep this site relatively sane, civil, thoughtful, and relentlessly curious. Having moderated online communities before I know it’s not easy, but you do it better than any moderator I’ve yet seen. Big kudos, big respect, and big thanks.
Cultural moderation/curation like the one at HN leads to more discourse. After participating in online forums for 20 or so years I always feel more inclined to partake in forums in which the tone of discussion is friendly and level of discussion is high.
Free-for-all or laissez-fair moderation leads to a race to the bottom in the quality of posts.
This, along with @dang's link to his past posts about "expected value" (found in the discussion linked to above) [1], was like reading Bartosz Ciechanowski's post on internal combustion engines [2] but for HN.
Thanks for all your work, @dang. Good to see that there's a philosophical soul at the helm. Would love to meet you in person one day.
Honestly, I’m here because I want to hear from people smarter than me (on certain subjects) what they think on those subjects, and in so doing maybe I’ll become a little more smart. I do not care what those people think about me thinking about their discourse, quite the contrary, I wish they’d state their opinions/facts like I wasn’t even reading. The same goes for me, of course, I really don’t care how my opinions/statements are received by those reading them, they might be seen as true, false, or a combination of the two, but I do not really care what impression they (the statements made by me) leave on the persons reading them.
Of course, I’m writing all these assuming the discourse is quite neutral, i.e. that it doesn’t involve personal attacks or the like.
The weird things about personal attacks are that sometimes it can be very difficult to figure out what might be perceived as a personal attack by someone else. Which is why a certain amount of conservatism in your communication is so important when you are participating in large public forum of semi-random people. Pretending like your words won't be taken exactly as you meant them means you won't learn how best to communicate in that context. You won't pick up on the cues showing you perhaps accidentally crossed a line with some portion of audience.
If you then blame the audience for how they reacted to the communication and don't adapt but instead dig in even more then a flamewar happens and your opportunity to communicate disappears.
Keep reading to dang's second level comment. It's even better than the first, and I thought the first was great. He put words to an intellectual journey I traveled as a poster here on this forum and didn't even realize it.
My favourite HN moments are chains of discussions, as if involving two people with opposing views, except every comment by a different person. As if someone else responded instead of you while you stepped away, knowing exactly what you meant earlier. All respectful and upvoted.
The thing I really like about HN's commenting system is that it's explicitly designed to discourage flamewars -- the way heavily downvoted comments end up "dead" means that "edgy" content is quickly buried.
Contrast that to Facebook or Twitter, where only positive signals exist, and the entire system is designed to surface "edgy" content as much as possible (because it gets the most engagement!)
One of the things I've learned over the years on HN is that I don't appreciate comments that are generic expressions of identity. That is, if somebody posts a comment that contains nothing specific to the subject at hand, that boils down to "I am progressive" or "conservatism is good" or "X is evil" I downvote it. That sort of comment is the bread and butter of so much internet discussion; we don't need more of it, and it doesn't contribute to what I enjoy about HN.
Alternatively: it enourages brigading and group think. Controversial opinions, even wildly incorrect ones (think: conspiracy theories and ideological nutjobbery) are also heavily upvoted, and it's the discussion that gets buried, since the only ones voting on comments are the people invested in the discussion.
So it's routine here to find topics of general interest, and click on them to find some kind of broad conspiracist screed at the top of discussion, try to reply, and discover yourself rapidly buried.
It's a real problem. And, yes, it tends to have a decidedly partisan bent to it. There are lots of perspectives you just can't get in front of eyeballs on HN in a meaningful way, you just end up rolling in the slop with the pigs.
>Contrast that to Facebook or Twitter, where only positive signals exist, and the entire system is designed to surface "edgy" content as much as possible (because it gets the most engagement!)
But that's the same system used for link submissions? you can upvote them but not downvote them.
Contrarian legitimate and respectful views are downvoted constantly and at an ever increasing pace. Let’s not pat ourselves too much. Comparing with FB is a low bar. I am not a fan of self congratulatory rhetoric when evidence doesn’t support it. HN’s quality of discussions are getting worse, more emotional and less objective. Party lines are clearly drawn. Anyone that wants to challenge this view can just browse threads from 2015 and see it for yourself.
I’m the guy that goes around and vouches for flagged comments if they’re not obviously vile/disrespectful/rude even if I disagree with it completely. Society functions because we allow voices that we obviously disagree with. Lines drawn today are getting closer towards center and the extremism is widening the spectrum.
HN has another issue, though: anyone expressing an opinion that goes against the HN "group-think" (for lack of a better word) gets downvoted to oblivion as a result, even if no participants go on a flame-bait mission. Most common topics that inevitably end in such downvote-fests are free speech (which is a minefield in itself, given that the US and European notions about free speech are radically different), nuclear energy, genetic engineering, government regulation and social security systems (with the exception of US healthcare, which seems to be generally hated).
A democratic debate based on facts or legitimate political differences (again, this is really prevalent in issues that have different mainstream viewpoints between the US and Europe) but still civilized in tone should not result in half the comments being greyed out or flagged.
It seems to work for flamewars and trollbait, but it also gets used to downvote opinions people disagree with even though the content itself is ok and that's a bit unfortunate.
The only problem I noticed a few times on hn is that some comments go dead even if they are right on the money. Edgy or not is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things if the content of the comment is correct.
I didn't end up down the oblivion hole just yet but I did see some that had good points... just not mainstream. Like round earth and trepanning used to be. One is mainstream while the other is now gone and considered barbaric. Some things take time to prove... or dissapear.
On the positive side: You don't have to content with baiting and such things for long.
>The thing I really like about HN's commenting system is that it's explicitly designed to discourage flamewars -- the way heavily downvoted comments end up "dead" means that "edgy" content is quickly buried.
It's sad that it goes well beyond that. You don't just remove edgy, you also remove anything controversial or dissenting. You end up with an echo chamber.
The question, how do you minimize cost of moderation while allowing discussion under hostile conditions? Nobody has an answer to this question.
That's how you get echo chambers actually, quite far from actual discourse. An echo chamber definitely cannot contain flamewars though.... so there's that.
On a side note - does HN feel more "downvotey" lately?
I feel like I'm seeing more comments that are grayed out but seem perfectly civil and reasonable. Often they're back in the black soon after, but I'm sure the time period when they're greyed out influences the discussion. Of course, I don't have any way to measure this.
I wonder if some of the thresholds need to be tweaked.
What flagging achieves in many cases is nothing more than turning this site into an echo chamber. One can choose to throw the baby out with the bath water, but let’s not pretend that’s the best approach. It’s a bunch of people nodding at one another all the time.
I would prefer something like “heat” instead of “flamebait”, which usually implies way too much intent and responsibility.
Of course sometimes “flamebait” is exactly the right word, sometimes people subconsciously want to provoke fights, and so forth. But it often feels like the word is defined arbitrarily by the majority side of arguments here, and so guidelines should definitely not use a word with those connotations.
Flamebait is irrelevant as a word anymore. It's the same thing as "troll". It used to be a great verb for a very specific thing. But since ignorance and fear of missing out on using it have meant it has lost near all meaning. The "troll" word just means anyone who you disagree with to lots of people now. Shame really. Same with flamebait. It's just anything you don't like, or might upset you. It's not actually the quality of the comment that is being criticised.
I just noticed this comment and you touched on an interesting point. I use the term "flamebait" because it doesn't imply anything about intent—only effects. If someone drops a lit match in a dry forest, that's flamebait (because it increases the probability of a fire), but that doesn't mean it was arson. It could just be negligence.
"Trolling", on the other hand, does imply intent. If you ask someone not to troll they will usually reply "but I wasn't", meaning that they had no intent to derail discussion, and since there's no way to refute that, it's a moderation dead-end. So I tend to only use that word in the most blatant cases.
The important thing for moderation is that intent doesn't matter much—what matters are effects. Our goal is to preserve and develop community, and for that it doesn't much matter whether a flamewar was intentional or unintentional. The important thing is to keep the site from burning in the first place.
Intent is almost useless for moderation because it's impossible to read: only you can know what your intent was, so if you say "my intent was X", no one can prove it wasn't. More deeply, basically everybody believes that their own intentions are good, regardless of how badly they behave. Whatever darker forces may be motivating us, we keep them in the shadows, so we can sincerely say "I was just trying to do $benign-thing" regardless of what the outcome was. Everyone feels themselves to be innocent this way.
The solution is to say: everyone who posts here is responsible for the effects their comments have on the thread. This goes against atomic ideas of responsibility. Most people would say "wait, how am I responsible if others react badly?" But in fact you are, because the mechanics of internet discussion are largely predictable. It's each commenter's responsibility to learn enough about those mechanics for their posts to likely have good effects, rather than likely bad effects. (By 'good' and 'bad' I mean in keeping with the site guidelines or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
This is what led to the principle that the goodness or badness of a comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... In other words, you actually are responsible for the effects your comments produce—not in a deterministic sense, but in a statistical one. (By 'you' I of course mean all of us.) If others respond badly in a way that could have been anticipated, the bulk of the responsibility lies with the root comment.
I think this principle is interesting because while it points to a notion of communal responsibility which is counterintuitive in our culture, it didn't originate with that. It originated purely out of moderation practice—just observing what works vs. what doesn't work while trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck.
One core problem is that any discussion of a non-technical topic must choose between being “edgy”/“inflammatory”/etc. (I.e. people express beliefs that differ from the standard issue) or being a completely useless echo chamber. Wanting to avoid inflammatory discussion is fine, but in that case HN should just ban non-technical topics entirely rather than mandate useless tepid discussions.
I will admit, I haven't always been the most level headed commenter all the time, but I've been trying to improve where I can, and I think what he says resonates with me.
I try to pretend I'm in an actual room with actual people IRL when I write. Being mindful of my tone and never name calling is always a great start.
HN certainly does a better job than reddit or facebook. Is it just because HN is smaller or more niche? Some subreddits are tiny and operate well.
I compare r/netsec to r/sysadmin. Netsec is about 426k members with 375 online. Sysadmin is 641k and 2.9k online. The difference tends to be moderation; r/sysadmin does moderation significantly better than r/netsec. Hence the much better community.
The challenge that HN has over r/sysadmin however is rigid topic. You're never going to see climate change or religion in r/sysadmin. That makes their job much easier.
Which makes HN so much more interesting because it tends to allow the challenging subjects like climate change. In fact you tend to get climate change as a subject almost every day. How does it work? Those challenging subjects simply don't have conversation. No risk for flame if everyone agrees with each other.
Does this site's comments sections, in general, really merit a self-congratulatory self-post like this?
For every instance of laser-guided micro-moderation, there's a dozen threads filled with reams of inane flamebait / people that merely have no idea what they're talking but sure act like they do. In practice, overall discussion quality across hackernews is no better than the next /r/tech-culture-general.
The only worthwhile comment threads are for links to the most technical/niche topics, where the site's audience has some actual hope of bringing relevant expertise/insight/experience. Those clearly aren't what attracts the majority of commenter activity, though.
This will likely be shadowbanned for whatever inscrutable reason that simultaneously allows all the flamebait by accounts named throwaway20321 though.
It is indeed a difficult balance to strike between keeping things cohesive and keeping them from becoming an echo chamber.
There is something to be said for allowing "flamebait". What's flame to one may be a welcome splash of water for another. Matter of fact, it might be that people who espouse so much "flame" may have legitimate issues fueling that flame.
There is absolutely also something to be said for wrangling conversation so as to keep it constructive. It's the balance of the two that achieves a community that remains healthy over time and not just healthy according to the popular values of any given time.
The problem with that argument is it doesn't take into account the existential risk. Sure a few flames may be stimulating but at some point the house burns down.
I landed on HN after more or less knowing/using almost all existing social media at that time. So would be the case with many other avid HN users if I have to take an educated guess. I admit that the transition to this culture took a while. Many 'flamebait' comments and several accounts later, I'd like to think I improved. Not just on HN but overall - real and virtual lives.
This does not mean that my intent earlier was to create toxicity on all the other platforms I had been on. Atleast as far as I know. It was mostly about letting the anger out while being mostly ignorant about the bigger picture and consequences. I am still the same person with similar values. I would still be enraged by the things I was back then. Only the way I react and communicate changed and is still changing.
All I mean here is, HN is a growing community where most new comers would have experienced culture on other platforms before they discover HN. While that is no excuse to tolerate flamebaitedness, there is a good chance that the person is still learning HN culture.
But honestly and gratefully, dang and other 'caretakers' make HN what it is. I sometimes think there is too much control on how communication happens here. With every passing day, I can clearly see why it should be that way.
It is interesting how one's behaviour is dictated by the social network they're participating in.
I've recently deleted my ten years old Reddit account because I was getting into fights with everybody, and to this day I can't spend 10 minutes on that site without feeling the need to comment "what the fuck are you talking about you dimwit" to some random poster, while I'm finding much easier to be civil on HN, and while I get my downvotes here as well sometimes, I'm on my best behaviour, and proud of the wonderful discussions I've had over the years.
I've tried getting into Twitter, and I feel I would soon turn into the most toxic asshat on the Internet like many over there are, so perhaps it's best I don't.
I have a similar experience, though I learnt my civility faster and was never banned from HN.
To leave Twitter is a question of seconds. To leave Twitter toxicity behind and start arguing in good faith instead of coming up with the smuggest takedown and expecting likes ... well, that takes much longer.
Here and conversation are the keywords in those points by dang. I come here, to HN, to have discussions/conversations about topics I'm interested in and to see other's viewpoints.
An easy example to frame a discussion about discussions here would be to set aside any political or other easily flammable topics (because unless it relates to tech/software/hacking its not really content for HN in my opinion) and pick the cliche of developer flame wars: vi vs. emacs
At HN I would expect curious dives into features, functions and reasons why people love one or the other, why they dislike one or the other or if there was something fundamentally new/different. If the discussion about vi vs. emacs was just inflammatory statements, its just not interesting for this audience, here.
Taking other viewpoints into consideration when you write comments in a discussion is just part of being a good online citizen.
[+] [-] Buttons840|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|4 years ago|reply
My little bit to add here, for what it's worth. (I've been here since the first few months or so). Good conversations don't have to involve a back-and-forth with your ideas always being involved. In huge groups of people, many times I find it good enough to try to add something useful to the discussion, provide a link for more depth if necessary, and then shut the hell up. It's not the "me" show.
I post stuff I've created all of the time here that doesn't get traction. As the old saying goes, thems the breaks, kid. Every now and then some oddball thing I've said or posted will take off, and that's a pretty cool feeling, but I learned not to chase that feeling. Instead just try to be a decent and respectful participant and delete more content before you hit the "send" button than you actually post. The rest of it is pretty much effectively random. (Insert discussion here about how some folks have such a good reputation that it doesn't matter. I don't like it. Many of them don't like it. But it is what it is)
[+] [-] ryandrake|4 years ago|reply
> Quite a few HN users, including some of the most prominent ones (and some of the best writers too), started off with a pugnacious commenting style and learned over the years to modulate that in the interest of curiosity, both in themselves and others. That's the learning curve we all have to go through here, and are still going through.
Not saying I'm prominent or a great writer, but here's an example from my own posting history showing two comments with the same general message, but the first one done in an unnecessarily provocative and condescending way, and the later one done after learning how to tone things down:
Score: -2, confrontational, no productive discussion generated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581452
Score: +95, modulated, resulting in better discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997427
[+] [-] ryandvm|4 years ago|reply
That's a great point. Generally my favorite part of the comments are all the little atomic nuggets of wisdom that folks post in one-off comments that are just tangentially related to the topic. To be honest I find most of the "conversation" threads to be tiresome as the typically just consist of 2 or 3 people talking past each other until the thread peters out.
[+] [-] ethbr0|4 years ago|reply
As a consequence, moderation (the verb) has tons of second+ order effects, as all interventions ripple out into future posts and attitudes. Sometimes in an opposite way to what you intended with your intervention (e.g. so angry about being moderated that my next three comments are written in anger).
> The problem with provocation and flamebait is easy to derive from first principles: you can't provoke or flame others into curiosity. (dang)
As clear a description of "why" as I've seen. And the statistical argument is a good one, because moderators never control who shows up. [0]
If a comment has a 60% chance of attracting a flame in response, then that comment is dangerous to the forum as a whole, and a responsible commentor will write it to decrease that as much as possible.
Personally, I find myself paring down my comments to minimal kernels, when commenting on hot button topics, because any excess verbiage is a potential target for a flame to notice and attach to.
[0] My quintessential example of this was putting in hours of moderating a touchy topic on the EVE forums, IMHO doing a decent job getting every calmed down, with good feelings all around, only for some jackass to pop into the thread for the first time with a borderline (non-moderatable) comment that lit everything back on fire. "I am Jack's broken heart", indeed.
[+] [-] musicale|4 years ago|reply
dang's first law of online comment moderation?
[+] [-] crate_barre|4 years ago|reply
only for some jackass to pop into the thread for the first time with a borderline (non-moderatable) comment that lit everything back on fire.
My dear friend, I suffer from serious depression, and whatever chaos one person can create with words is pure joy to me. Do not moderate my happiness.
[+] [-] JasonFruit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxikCZ|4 years ago|reply
Seeing the thought process of a moderator explained in such way makes me realize how low my bar for "good moderation" was. Thank you dang.
[+] [-] originalvichy|4 years ago|reply
Free-for-all or laissez-fair moderation leads to a race to the bottom in the quality of posts.
Thanks for keeping HN a nice place everyone.
[+] [-] earksiinni|4 years ago|reply
Thanks for all your work, @dang. Good to see that there's a philosophical soul at the helm. Would love to meet you in person one day.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2]: https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/, which I learned about from HN
[+] [-] paganel|4 years ago|reply
Of course, I’m writing all these assuming the discourse is quite neutral, i.e. that it doesn’t involve personal attacks or the like.
[+] [-] zaphar|4 years ago|reply
If you then blame the audience for how they reacted to the communication and don't adapt but instead dig in even more then a flamewar happens and your opportunity to communicate disappears.
[+] [-] darkerside|4 years ago|reply
Also,
> If that's too strong a metaphor
I see what you did there!
[+] [-] IanSanders|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshxyz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warning26|4 years ago|reply
Contrast that to Facebook or Twitter, where only positive signals exist, and the entire system is designed to surface "edgy" content as much as possible (because it gets the most engagement!)
[+] [-] cwp|4 years ago|reply
One of the things I've learned over the years on HN is that I don't appreciate comments that are generic expressions of identity. That is, if somebody posts a comment that contains nothing specific to the subject at hand, that boils down to "I am progressive" or "conservatism is good" or "X is evil" I downvote it. That sort of comment is the bread and butter of so much internet discussion; we don't need more of it, and it doesn't contribute to what I enjoy about HN.
[+] [-] newacct583|4 years ago|reply
So it's routine here to find topics of general interest, and click on them to find some kind of broad conspiracist screed at the top of discussion, try to reply, and discover yourself rapidly buried.
It's a real problem. And, yes, it tends to have a decidedly partisan bent to it. There are lots of perspectives you just can't get in front of eyeballs on HN in a meaningful way, you just end up rolling in the slop with the pigs.
[+] [-] gruez|4 years ago|reply
But that's the same system used for link submissions? you can upvote them but not downvote them.
[+] [-] systemvoltage|4 years ago|reply
I’m the guy that goes around and vouches for flagged comments if they’re not obviously vile/disrespectful/rude even if I disagree with it completely. Society functions because we allow voices that we obviously disagree with. Lines drawn today are getting closer towards center and the extremism is widening the spectrum.
[+] [-] mschuster91|4 years ago|reply
A democratic debate based on facts or legitimate political differences (again, this is really prevalent in issues that have different mainstream viewpoints between the US and Europe) but still civilized in tone should not result in half the comments being greyed out or flagged.
[+] [-] cinntaile|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samoa42|4 years ago|reply
i've never seen a downvote button on HN. Is my browser to old or not supported?
[+] [-] xeromal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] White_Wolf|4 years ago|reply
On the positive side: You don't have to content with baiting and such things for long.
[+] [-] sleepysysadmin|4 years ago|reply
It's sad that it goes well beyond that. You don't just remove edgy, you also remove anything controversial or dissenting. You end up with an echo chamber.
The question, how do you minimize cost of moderation while allowing discussion under hostile conditions? Nobody has an answer to this question.
[+] [-] seoulmetro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shusaku|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madeofpalk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex_c|4 years ago|reply
I feel like I'm seeing more comments that are grayed out but seem perfectly civil and reasonable. Often they're back in the black soon after, but I'm sure the time period when they're greyed out influences the discussion. Of course, I don't have any way to measure this.
I wonder if some of the thresholds need to be tweaked.
[+] [-] jikbd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PrincessJess|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] guscost|4 years ago|reply
Of course sometimes “flamebait” is exactly the right word, sometimes people subconsciously want to provoke fights, and so forth. But it often feels like the word is defined arbitrarily by the majority side of arguments here, and so guidelines should definitely not use a word with those connotations.
Otherwise, 10/10, great work as always.
[+] [-] seoulmetro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterGR|4 years ago|reply
There's a great expression, said of flame-y conversations, they:
"Generate more heat than light."
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
"Trolling", on the other hand, does imply intent. If you ask someone not to troll they will usually reply "but I wasn't", meaning that they had no intent to derail discussion, and since there's no way to refute that, it's a moderation dead-end. So I tend to only use that word in the most blatant cases.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The important thing for moderation is that intent doesn't matter much—what matters are effects. Our goal is to preserve and develop community, and for that it doesn't much matter whether a flamewar was intentional or unintentional. The important thing is to keep the site from burning in the first place.
Intent is almost useless for moderation because it's impossible to read: only you can know what your intent was, so if you say "my intent was X", no one can prove it wasn't. More deeply, basically everybody believes that their own intentions are good, regardless of how badly they behave. Whatever darker forces may be motivating us, we keep them in the shadows, so we can sincerely say "I was just trying to do $benign-thing" regardless of what the outcome was. Everyone feels themselves to be innocent this way.
The solution is to say: everyone who posts here is responsible for the effects their comments have on the thread. This goes against atomic ideas of responsibility. Most people would say "wait, how am I responsible if others react badly?" But in fact you are, because the mechanics of internet discussion are largely predictable. It's each commenter's responsibility to learn enough about those mechanics for their posts to likely have good effects, rather than likely bad effects. (By 'good' and 'bad' I mean in keeping with the site guidelines or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
This is what led to the principle that the goodness or badness of a comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... In other words, you actually are responsible for the effects your comments produce—not in a deterministic sense, but in a statistical one. (By 'you' I of course mean all of us.) If others respond badly in a way that could have been anticipated, the bulk of the responsibility lies with the root comment.
I think this principle is interesting because while it points to a notion of communal responsibility which is counterintuitive in our culture, it didn't originate with that. It originated purely out of moderation practice—just observing what works vs. what doesn't work while trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck.
[+] [-] wyager|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SwimSwimHungry|4 years ago|reply
I will admit, I haven't always been the most level headed commenter all the time, but I've been trying to improve where I can, and I think what he says resonates with me.
I try to pretend I'm in an actual room with actual people IRL when I write. Being mindful of my tone and never name calling is always a great start.
[+] [-] sleepysysadmin|4 years ago|reply
I compare r/netsec to r/sysadmin. Netsec is about 426k members with 375 online. Sysadmin is 641k and 2.9k online. The difference tends to be moderation; r/sysadmin does moderation significantly better than r/netsec. Hence the much better community.
The challenge that HN has over r/sysadmin however is rigid topic. You're never going to see climate change or religion in r/sysadmin. That makes their job much easier.
Which makes HN so much more interesting because it tends to allow the challenging subjects like climate change. In fact you tend to get climate change as a subject almost every day. How does it work? Those challenging subjects simply don't have conversation. No risk for flame if everyone agrees with each other.
[+] [-] promploy1|4 years ago|reply
For every instance of laser-guided micro-moderation, there's a dozen threads filled with reams of inane flamebait / people that merely have no idea what they're talking but sure act like they do. In practice, overall discussion quality across hackernews is no better than the next /r/tech-culture-general.
The only worthwhile comment threads are for links to the most technical/niche topics, where the site's audience has some actual hope of bringing relevant expertise/insight/experience. Those clearly aren't what attracts the majority of commenter activity, though.
This will likely be shadowbanned for whatever inscrutable reason that simultaneously allows all the flamebait by accounts named throwaway20321 though.
[+] [-] azhu|4 years ago|reply
There is something to be said for allowing "flamebait". What's flame to one may be a welcome splash of water for another. Matter of fact, it might be that people who espouse so much "flame" may have legitimate issues fueling that flame.
There is absolutely also something to be said for wrangling conversation so as to keep it constructive. It's the balance of the two that achieves a community that remains healthy over time and not just healthy according to the popular values of any given time.
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazybreather|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1_player|4 years ago|reply
I've recently deleted my ten years old Reddit account because I was getting into fights with everybody, and to this day I can't spend 10 minutes on that site without feeling the need to comment "what the fuck are you talking about you dimwit" to some random poster, while I'm finding much easier to be civil on HN, and while I get my downvotes here as well sometimes, I'm on my best behaviour, and proud of the wonderful discussions I've had over the years.
I've tried getting into Twitter, and I feel I would soon turn into the most toxic asshat on the Internet like many over there are, so perhaps it's best I don't.
[+] [-] inglor_cz|4 years ago|reply
To leave Twitter is a question of seconds. To leave Twitter toxicity behind and start arguing in good faith instead of coming up with the smuggest takedown and expecting likes ... well, that takes much longer.
[+] [-] matt_s|4 years ago|reply
An easy example to frame a discussion about discussions here would be to set aside any political or other easily flammable topics (because unless it relates to tech/software/hacking its not really content for HN in my opinion) and pick the cliche of developer flame wars: vi vs. emacs
At HN I would expect curious dives into features, functions and reasons why people love one or the other, why they dislike one or the other or if there was something fundamentally new/different. If the discussion about vi vs. emacs was just inflammatory statements, its just not interesting for this audience, here.
Taking other viewpoints into consideration when you write comments in a discussion is just part of being a good online citizen.