[HN Gopher] Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle ...
___________________________________________________________________
Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running
HN (2020)
Author : QuarkForMrMark
Score : 362 points
Date : 2022-07-09 11:44 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| water8 wrote:
| Well if he's busy banning people for political ideologies when in
| reality he's running a message board with the technology from
| 1995
| roflyear wrote:
| HN isn't the place for politics. If I was a zealous liberal or
| a zealous right wing nutjob I'd imagine I'd get roughly equal
| treatment.
| ratsmack wrote:
| > HN isn't the place for politics.
|
| It seems that if the politics meet a certain criteria, they
| are allowed ad nauseam. You also see where certain names are
| allowed to say things where others are chastised for the
| rebuttal of said things.
| hahaitsfunny wrote:
| Bingo.
| the_only_law wrote:
| It a place for politics now. Many "guidelines" are written in
| a sufficiently vague way that they can be interested widely
| and contradict other guidelines if you apply a healthy amount
| of pedantry.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Moreso, it's a place for thoughtful discussion. I've seen
| great comments from people I've disagreed with get lots of
| positive attention, and trolling comments from people I agree
| with downvoted into oblivion. I respect that.
| hahaitsfunny wrote:
| Thoughtful discussion means that anything which offends
| sensibilities gets downvoted into oblivion, then right?
| Pretty sure that's what happens on here when anyone brings
| up any political views which might not be considered
| mainstream or PC enough.
|
| Then again, it seems like this is what at least half of the
| US population now considers thoughtful discussion - if it
| offends one group or another's sensibilities, it must be
| fiction and anyone making such claims must be cancelled /
| censored.
| Arnt wrote:
| Try harder. HN uses a lisp, which is a programming language
| family from the sixties. Can it possibly be any more obsolete
| -- according to the test you prefer? Something has to be very
| wrong with HN. Unless the problem is that the _test_ is
| bonkers.
| hahaitsfunny wrote:
| Great - he created another site that embraces censorship, echo
| chambers, and mob rule, very similar to twitter, just with a tech
| / academic theme. Amazing accomplishment.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Well dang. I've certainly enjoyed the site over the years. I know
| you're compensated for your work. But, I don't think you're quite
| well-compensated for your work. I would like to offer a humble
| thanks from those in the community that I've learned from over
| the years and for dang and company's moderation.
| nano9 wrote:
| Posts like these, for me, highlight the class divide. PG thinks
| "few people" grasp how much effort dang expends, when in reality,
| a whole class of people working in customer service roles expend
| roughly the same amount of effort. Sure, dang might be uniquely
| efficient, but the expenditure of effort is on the same order.
|
| I once witnessed a Delta employee in ATL process a queue of
| customers, all with issues regarding their seat number. Without
| knowing too much about the process, it seemed to me that she took
| everyone's story and fixed the seating arrangement so that
| everyone would be seated together by group. I was impressed, but
| she doesn't get any applause for solving (well, approximating) an
| NP-complete problem, and I doubt she focused on math during her
| years in education, and certainly she won't think to write a blog
| focused on "Solving the N-passengers, K-groups problem 30 minutes
| before boarding time." Most importantly, she could have easily
| said "not my problem," but didn't.
|
| That is anecdata but it does not stand alone. I regularly witness
| about 10% of customer service personnel giving it their all to
| represent their company and keep customers happy. They are the
| "dangs" of those organizations, and they keep everything running
| smoothly. So it would seem "few people" is not accurate. Instead
| it's an huge lower-middle (under)class cohort keeping capitalist
| dreams alive.
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| I'd say the tendency is to absolutely trivialise the work that
| goes into moderating online forums. It should be easy, right,
| you just click buttons while sitting at home in your pajamas,
| no? Well no, not really.
| drc500free wrote:
| I think most people don't understand how difficult it is to
| wield power over others when you're aiming for a good
| community. Many commenters who complain about any form of
| governance don't realize what a small fraction of power is
| actually used, and how much more oppressive their ideas would
| be in practice.
| Cipater wrote:
| Did you really misunderstand what PG said to this extent or are
| you just arguing in bad faith?
| foogazi wrote:
| > PG thinks "few people" grasp how much effort dang expends,
| when in reality, a whole class of people working in customer
| service roles expend roughly the same amount of effort.
|
| PG didn't say that no one expends more effort than dang, he
| said that few people grasp the effort expended in moderating HN
| drc500free wrote:
| I think you're on to something with this. dang does a fantastic
| job, but not an exceedingly rare job. What's rare is a "service
| worker" that the tech class respects enough to observe closely
| and be inspired by, because his work looks similar enough to
| theirs.
|
| There's a specific term (Emotional Labor) coined by service
| workers to describe staying even-keeled when dealing with
| users/customers. That term wouldn't exist if "few people"
| grasped how hard that part of it is.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor
| chucksmash wrote:
| > Posts like these, for me, highlight the class divide.
|
| To start from Paul G. saying "Thank you dang, ..." and end up
| at "...(under)class cohort keeping capitalist dreams alive"
| seems like stretching a particular framework of thought past
| the point where it usefully describes people.
| pen2l wrote:
| Fortunately he doesn't have to go through what moderators of
| mainstream social media sites have to go through (for which they
| often need long-term therapy), still, it feels unfair to saddle
| one man with so much of that.
|
| Give him a nice long vacation already, the responsibility should
| probably be split among a 5-10 person team anyway.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Off topic, but I just realized I've been saying his username
| wrong in my head for years.
| tomcam wrote:
| It's ALWAYS Chinese in my head. I was blown away to find out
| about this Dan Gackle business
| srvmshr wrote:
| I wonder how does dang manage it everyday. HN moderation can be
| so tiring. There is multitude of comment types: insightful,
| accusatory, snarky etc. And dang does point out the egregious
| ones every time.
| masswerk wrote:
| Also, does dang ever sleep?
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Wikimedia's statistics tools for its wikis includes a bubble
| chart of number of edits by a user per hour of day per day of
| week[1] (AFAICT a type of graph called a punchcard chart),
| used precisely for when you wonder this about a Wikimedia
| user.
|
| That and other detailed statistics are only shown for users
| who opt in, but anyone motivated can process a database dump
| locally, even using XTools itself, which is open source. Edit
| history can reveal a lot of information about a user, so this
| an inevitable privacy problem for any scrapable site.
|
| [1] https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-
| timecard/en.wikipedia.org/Jimb...
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| Sometimes when I see an especially good comment on hacker news I
| click on the name and read through other things they've written.
| You find really insightful stuff this way.
|
| One day I see dang write a comment that was really interesting
| about how threads tend to develop over time, like some kind of
| law of webforums.
|
| I thought "ah ha! I'll go read a bunch of Dan's comments. I bet
| those are good."
|
| But if you go look his profile is just nonstop very politely
| moderating people. All. The. Time.
|
| Dan please write a book some time, I'd read it.
| tomcam wrote:
| I'd buy that book in an instant
| samizdis wrote:
| I'd like to think that more than a few people grasp this. He's
| some kind of machine - in the best, complimentary way. His
| replies to emails are succinct, helpful, educational, and still
| personable. No idea how he retains his equanimity across
| hundreds/thousands of interactions, mostly with strangers. IMO
| it's a worthwhile lesson (and a free one) to peruse his comment
| history:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
|
| Respect and many thanks, dang.
| [deleted]
| dahart wrote:
| I honestly wonder sometimes how it's physically possible to do
| what dang does, it seems like such an enormous and Sisyphean
| task. Sad to see twitter replies complaining about the
| moderation, because if it wasn't for the moderation the quality
| here would be much lower, the moderation is the whole reason
| those people are attracted to participating here. Respect and
| many thanks indeed.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| As someone that moderated a ... _pithy_ ... community site, I
| am all too familiar with that type of complaint.
|
| I would regularly get called a "nazi," because I would step
| into catfights, and break them up, or "nip them in the bud."
| Once you've been doing it a while, you learn to smell trouble
| brewing, and it can escalate rapidly.
|
| Many folks chafe at restrictions, and they may actually be
| correct. They, themselves, may be entirely trustworthy; but
| others may not.
|
| Generally, we're all for rules and structure, _as long as
| they apply to others_ (especially those with whom we
| disagree), but they shouldn't apply to us.
|
| I participate in HN, quite a bit. I basically avoid all other
| social media.
|
| A big reason is the decorum, here. If it dissolves, then I
| will no longer participate.
|
| I've been "danged" a few times. In some cases, I felt that it
| was not what I considered "reasonable," but I accept the
| slaps anyway.
|
| When in an Italian city, wear a bedsheet, and all that...
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > Once you've been doing it a while, you learn to smell
| trouble brewing, and it can escalate rapidly.
|
| I'm not actually proposing this, but that makes me curious
| how well that could be modeled via deep learning.
| freitasm wrote:
| I run an online community, with my own developed
| software. We use lots of different tools to prevent spam,
| harassment, etc. We use different APIS to check IP, ASN,
| email for previous spam behaviour, use of disposable
| email domains, etc.
|
| We have a team of moderators and as mentioned before you
| can "smell" something brewing. The words, to whom they
| are directed, etc.
|
| A couple of years ago we started using Perspective API
| [0], a Google service "Using machine learning to reduce
| toxicity online". We use the toxicity model, trained by
| Google and The NY Times. Basically we submit the text of
| posts and replies and receive a score. We do some account
| history calculations and if it's past a certain threshold
| then moderators receive a notification - we can't read
| all posts in our platform all the time but this helps a
| lot.
|
| The community itself helps too, and the reporting tool is
| used when things happen that we aren't aware.
|
| [0] https://www.perspectiveapi.com/#/home
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's exactly what FB and Twitter are
| trying to do.
|
| Not sure how well it's working out.
|
| I hear constant stories about how "blunt instrument"
| these are, and how it's impossible to appeal.
| shagie wrote:
| There are a lot of projects out there that are attempting
| to do this because of the impracticability of a human
| team to deal with the entire torrent of information.
|
| For example https://playvalorant.com/en-
| us/news/announcements/valorant-v...
|
| > As part of a larger effort to combat disruptive
| behavior, Riot Games recently updated its Privacy Notice
| and Terms of Service to allow us to record and evaluate
| in-game voice communications when a report for that type
| of behavior is submitted--with the goal of kicking this
| off in VALORANT first.
|
| I believe it would be quite possible. Text is a bit dryer
| to work with but has the advantage of being all text.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I only recall getting danged once and it was spot-on. I
| wasn't acting like a full on flaming ass, but there was at
| least a glowing ember there and he phrased his response in
| a way that made it easy to accept.
| jorvi wrote:
| On an older account I once had a factual comment detached
| whilst the other person his comment (which pretty much
| stated the polar opposite) stayed under the main post.
| Looking at which other comments stayed or got detached it
| was quite easy to see an enormous bias. Pointing that
| out, all I got was a vague "I understand you are
| passionate". I think that's the only time I've ever seen
| him miss his stride, though.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Link?
| ryandrake wrote:
| One of the moderation techniques I don't really
| understand is the "We detached this subthread" move. I
| don't know what it accomplishes, besides narrowly
| targeting a (sometimes highly-upvoted) subcomment to
| specifically bury it. It's harsher than even flagging
| because it nukes the whole subthread full of replies,
| too. Often no explanation. Just "We detached this
| subthread from [url]" and that's that. Seems like
| something you'd only want to do to the most heinous of
| posts.
|
| I recall having a +80 upvote or so reply "detached" in
| this way, but can't find the link.
| dang wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27132402
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Many folks chafe at restrictions, and they may actually
| be correct.
|
| We're at least a couple decades beyond the point where a
| reasonable person could possibly entertain such a thought.
| Lack of restrictions always turns communities into
| cesspools. They don't necessarily die, but the people that
| hang out there are the ones that enjoy spending time in
| cesspools, and that's usually different from the vision the
| creator of the site had in mind.
| frenet wrote:
| There is however a big difference in the legitimacy of
| restrictions. The reality is that their are many
| unreasonable people on the Internet. Most unreasonable
| people however think of themselves as reasonable and
| other similarly unreasonable people as reasonable as
| well. There are also some reasonable people on the
| Internet. So how do you know which one you are?
|
| When we can't assume one or the other we have to look at
| something else where we might reach a conclusion. If
| someone says they are oppressed we can look at what would
| hinder their oppression. Arguably this would be things
| like transparency, participation and equality. As those
| things make oppression harder.
|
| So if someone says they are being silenced a reasonable
| person might look if there are multiple known moderators
| who can check each other, a moderation log to see how
| moderation is happening or some voting system to reflect
| the opinions of the community.
|
| In most cases where people are says they are being
| silenced these things doesn't exist. As such it would be
| unreasonable to dismiss their opinion as there seems to
| be an argument for the restrictions not being legitimate.
| Otherwise you just create a different cesspool of
| unreasonable people.
| bachmeier wrote:
| It would basically be impossible for a site like HN to
| silence anyone. There are many other highly-visible
| places to break news even if dang wants to cover
| something up. It's not remotely the same as if the
| government were to impose restrictions on speech.
| frenet wrote:
| I don't think it is impossible. If I did I wouldn't have
| made the argument I did. I also didn't say anything about
| the government. The same situation applies to for example
| a company. A company that wants to find out how things
| are going is going to insist in multiple interests in
| important meetings, documentation on decisions taken and
| things like employee surveys.
|
| Presumably you disagree, but then you disagree with the
| far majority of well regarded implementations in the real
| world. I am about to buy an apartment and it is the same
| thing. You need a witness, a contract and approval from
| the housing organization. Because that how you reasonably
| decide what happened.
|
| And yes, people break the news all the time. For example
| on Twitter on this very post. That is the point. When
| they do how do you know who is reasonable? Which is what
| I have argued.
| cmonnow wrote:
| i wonder what tool dang uses to see comment replies and
| respond ?
|
| the ycombinator web UI does not encourage real-time or even
| near-time responses.
| striking wrote:
| To my knowledge, there is a combination of specific views
| on the site that highlight important features of the site
| (an obvious example might be the list of flagged comments;
| a less-obvious example might be
| https://news.ycombinator.com/topcomments which shows the
| top-most comment of each front page item) as well as email
| alerts from a variety of sources, some of those being user-
| driven.
| cmonnow wrote:
| in order to read your reply to my comment, i had to :
|
| - click on my user name
|
| - click on comments
|
| - search/scroll to this thread and see your reply
|
| I don't get notified of comment replies like on reddit.
| there is no slack/email page of DMs/PMs.
| striking wrote:
| You can refresh your replies list over time, or you can
| sign up for Notify HN or any similar service that
| notifies you via email.
| effingwewt wrote:
| You can just click the 'threads' link at the top left and
| it'll show you your comments and nested replies.
|
| I had no idea about this until someone mentioned it.
| Prior to that I couldn't be bothered very often to check
| my comments for replies. It was too many steps and made
| me feel narcissistic for doing all that just to see.
|
| edit- spelling.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I get a very different sense from the reading of his comments
| to users; curt and inconsiderate. He tends to make declarations
| about behavior that sound objective but are really just his
| very casual read of a situation, and there's no appeal or
| redress possible.
|
| Additionally, he tends to favor the original aggressor,
| ignoring the concept of instigation to fix the proximate cause
| of the negative interactions here. Don't get caught punching
| second, in other words.
|
| It's classic utilitarianism; if 1% of users get shat upon by
| dang, and 99% in any way benefit from his negative behavior, I
| suppose the folks here would be alright with that?
| lolinder wrote:
| > Additionally, he tends to favor the original aggressor,
| ignoring the concept of instigation to fix the proximate
| cause of the negative interactions here. Don't get caught
| punching second, in other words.
|
| Can you give an example? I just went through dang's comments
| in the last few days and found nothing of the sort, and it
| has not been my experience at all, unless posting an
| unpopular opinion counts as instigation. Dang's pattern,
| every time I've been witness to his moderation, is to cut the
| first comment that descends into incivility or flaming.
|
| Conversations on HN sometimes get heated. Some people take
| people disagreeing with them as a personal attack and quickly
| descend into _actual_ personal attacks in response. Those
| people may _feel_ like they 're being singled out by dang,
| but it's because they actually are misbehaving.
| abraae wrote:
| It should be easy for you to link to examples substantiating
| this?
| touisteur wrote:
| I like to think he's some kind of monk, a zen master of human
| forums, and a genuinely good person. At least any exchange I
| had with him or observed with all kinds of people have been
| full of humanity, while firm in his mission. I don't know how
| he does it, and I wish we'd celebrate him and people like him
| far more.
| interestica wrote:
| I've always just hoped that he's not just one person.
| samizdis wrote:
| I posted a link elsewhere in this thread to this article [1]
| - _The lonely work of moderating Hacker News (2019)_ - and
| you might like its author 's insights/views, plus there are
| plentiful quotes from Dang and his colleague, Scott Bell.
| [edit to add: a comment in reply to this says that Scott no
| longer works at HN. Surely Dang can't be doing this solo
| nowadays?]
|
| [1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-
| valley/th...
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| It's just Dan now, I think. Scott no longer works for HN.
| touisteur wrote:
| Thanks for this. It makes me hopeful that we can find
| people and a process to keep things civil and somehow
| engaging in such a forum.
|
| Sure HN has its pains (and I'm an unconditional of the late
| n-gate site) but they don't come from moderation
| shenanigans.
|
| I also appreciate the pedagogy I often see. Some
| participants here have never been actively moderated and
| dang takes the time to _explain_ as if the moderated person
| was one of the 10000 of the day.
| tyjen wrote:
| Yep, dang is amazing.
| xbar wrote:
| Echo'd.
|
| Respect and many thanks, dang.
|
| Paul really should fund an AI startup focused on chatboard
| moderation based solely on learnings-from-dang.
| tomcam wrote:
| Is the one thing we've learned that you need multiple human
| (or one dang) mods for a successful social media sites?
| usrn wrote:
| I've been banned by Dang before, but of all the moderators on the
| internet I still like him the most. He tries hard and after all
| these years still works in good faith as far as I can tell. HN
| wouldn't be what it is without him.
| cs702 wrote:
| And it _shows_. THANK YOU DANG!
| eli wrote:
| Seems like a management problem when one employee is expending
| huge effort to keep the enterprise running.
| gist wrote:
| Agree. HN is not a charity and it is most certainly profitable
| enough to be able to not have so much effort vested in one
| person (if that is the case that is).
|
| I understand fully PG thanking him publicly for his effort and
| the pats on the back (by others here) but let's face it it's a
| job in the end and he is doing his job.
| paulcole wrote:
| Is this a volunteer role or a full-time job?
| vasco wrote:
| I hope he gets to invest in the fund!
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Yeah, really... HN has been instrumental in generating good
| publicity for YC.
| paulcole wrote:
| > HN has been instrumental in generating good publicity for
| YC
|
| This is literally why it exists.
| samizdis wrote:
| As far as I can tell from this article [1] - _The lonely work
| of moderating Hacker News_ (2019) - it 's a full-time job. The
| article was discussed at length on HN [2].
|
| [1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-
| valley/th...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052
| jddddd wrote:
| It's a full time job to help a VC fund make more money.
|
| This thread is bizarre and cult like.
| paulcole wrote:
| Ha yeah I was making fun of the (many) people who think this
| is some kind of noble labor of love.
| shultays wrote:
| It is OK to compliment people for their good work, you
| don't have to work for free to receive praise.
| paulcole wrote:
| I don't disagree. That doesn't change the fact that many
| people don't understand what HN is.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Does it have to be this way?
| daenz wrote:
| I always assumed "dang" was a placeholder for a small team
| designed to appear as a single person. Is this not the case?
| cinntaile wrote:
| It is one person.
| [deleted]
| cronix wrote:
| For those not wanting to be forced to login or don't have an
| account to read comments:
| https://nitter.net/paulg/status/1282055086433284103
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I believe it. I've only run much smaller forums and even they
| were a nightmare.
| Inhibit wrote:
| So as it turns out the key to making Twitter less crap is
| leveraging Daniel Gackle clones.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I think the community here is the other part of the equation. I
| see HN as a gigantic spinning apparatus that occasionally gets
| out of alignment by a few microns. Dan simply adds a bit of
| corrective force in a few areas as appropriate to keep
| everything happy.
|
| Twitter is a bunch of pigs wallowing in a pit of mud by
| comparison. You could put a million dangs in there and they
| would still wind up as muddy as everyone else at the end of the
| day. Making twitter less crap likely requires some orbital
| bombardment analogies.
| closedloop129 wrote:
| To clean Twitter, wouldn't it be enough to let people create
| filter groups, kind of like Brave Goggles [1] that are lists
| of accounts or lists of lists of accounts ?
|
| People would cluster themselves into groups with consistent
| values and you would just need some moderators for minor
| adjustments.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31837986
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Call it Project Gacklemore
| runnerup wrote:
| 'sillysaurusx -- I respect your opinions. I know that I respect
| your opinions because you're able to use HackerNews as a bully
| pulpit to reach a very wide audience and I personally both enjoy
| and look forward to seeing your participation. I've often wished
| I had better opportunities to learn from you and always silently
| wish you well on your personal journey.
|
| I also see from your Twitter reply that you feel HN hasn't
| necessarily been a great platform for your participation. I just
| want to counter that feeling with real-world result: I've read
| hundreds of your comments and at least a dozen of your
| submissions. I suspect HackerNews is actually a fantastically
| appropriate platform for you, and not an adversarial one.
|
| At any rate, the disconnect between what I perceive as an outside
| observer vs. what you perceive as a "man in the arena"[0] is a
| fascinating phenomenon in its own right.
|
| 0: https://prisonist.org/quotes-we-love-theodore-roosevelt-
| man-...
| zamalek wrote:
| The one complaint is this:
|
| > He has had a habit of silencing some long-standing members of
| HN
|
| If anything, that shows excellent moderation skills. Everyone
| should abide by the same rules.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| One thing I learned from moderating an internet community in
| the past: Some of the long-term users had become experts at
| skirting the rules. They had seen so many posts and watched
| so many other people get moderated that they learned how to
| walk right up to the line without explicitly crossing it.
|
| Some times they'd become very good at baiting other people
| into breaking the rules. Or they would writing extremely
| inflammatory comments in a pseudo-cordial writing style that
| looked friendly/naive but was actually crafted to incite a
| flame war.
|
| There was a lot of "You should know better" admonishing these
| provocateur forum members, but for many the only solution was
| to remove them from the forum completely.
| doogerdog wrote:
| A couple of very good computer forums that I depended on
| years ago were slowly destroyed by "long term users". A
| small group seemed to think that their long history and
| prolific posting made it their playground. Little by little
| it became less worth my time to check it out every day.
| This place is always worth a glance. Every day. On the best
| discussions you can sense that people only post if they
| feel they really have something to add.
|
| I love what Dang refers to as HN's non-silowed nature. It
| is easy to find useful and fascinating discussions on any
| topic. When I have the time and energy, sometimes I dive in
| for a few hours. When I come up for air I'm tired but
| generally pleased with experience.
|
| A common complaint here is that it ain't what it used to
| be. There may be a little more fluff now but when it's good
| - It's darn good.
| abraae wrote:
| This reminds me of a pub we used to go to occasionally in
| Berkshire. When one of the crusty old locals went to the
| bar, they were always served first, even if other
| customers had already been waiting a while. Great for
| them, but made for an unwelcoming vibe that definitely
| reduced their custom. We only put up with it because they
| had a great garden area for kids.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Ye, we really don't want a "HN Royalty" clique that are
| immune to moderation. You see that on Reddit and it does not
| tend to elevate the conversation.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Yup. The tricky bit of moderation to me is dealing with well
| known, long term users. I find the particularly troublesome
| sort being people who have a good amount of contributions to
| their name, but a variable temper. If somebody's always a
| jerk that's pretty easy. The tricky bit is when it's
| inconsistent.
|
| Other long term community members learn what sets this person
| off and avoid it, and so everything seems quiet for weeks
| until somebody unaware hits on just the wrong subject, and
| this old, seemingly respected member explodes at them.
|
| This is problematic for a community. New people need to
| either learn to navigate this minefield, or decide that it's
| not worth it and leave. And a lot will definitely pick the
| second option.
|
| I ended up banning just a few such people and I'd say things
| have improved greatly as a result. Yes, there's a loss in
| term of contribution from very skilled people, but if a
| single person sours the mood for several dozen, it's not a
| good tradeoff. And they tend to drive away other skilled
| people as well, who can easily leave and be welcome must
| anywhere else that doesn't require them to tiptoe around that
| one tricky person.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Context that I had to look up: sillysaurusx on HN is theshawwn
| on Twitter, whose replies to the submitted tweet this is a
| response to. (What makes that relative clause so hard to
| parse?)
|
| Meta: Is that an apostrophe as a username sigil? Where did it
| come from? Another instance:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17681886
| permo-w wrote:
| I read it as a quotation mark. of course there's no closing
| mark, but it could be a mistake
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| > Meta: Is that an apostrophe as a username sigil? Where did
| it originate?
|
| It's a LISP-ism. It means don't evaluate the symbol before
| passing it.
| raldi wrote:
| The aforementioned replies: https://mobile.twitter.com/thesha
| wwn/status/1282058054754799...
| pen2l wrote:
| That's a tough cookie for sure but sillysauraus is not
| seeing the big picture.
|
| It is tragic that we don't have yummyfajitas' or
| michaelochurch's takes which went against the grain and
| were probably interesting in some ways, but they in the end
| shot themselves in the foot by delivering their message in
| odiously-scented wrappings. Frequently employing ad hominem
| attacks, calling women names, etc. quickly evaporates the
| credibility of the person behind them, sours the culture of
| the community, and is just not a very good thing to do,
| irrespective of whatever validity or truth is being
| conveyed.
| the_only_law wrote:
| And now every other fucking comment I see does this. So
| why not have them back?
| raldi wrote:
| MOC was a toxic charlatan who posted exactly the kind of
| comments that have no place in a well-moderated forum.
| frenet wrote:
| That is just because most people leave when they don't
| like something. In a bad environment you would expect the
| majority of those who stay to still find the environment
| good and themselves rational, with only a few outspoken
| against it. It is a relatively basic concept in markets,
| sociology, biology, information systems and reasoning.
|
| The person you and the comment next to me are talking
| about is not here to defend themselves. They are
| specifically not here to defend themselves because they
| aren't allowed to. The justification for them not being
| allowed to is because they talked badly about someone
| else. Yet, it is apparently accepted to talk badly about
| them.
|
| Your are even saying that we shouldn't trust this person
| because they in your opnion engaged in ad hominem
| attacks. But by doing so you are arguably performing an
| ad hominem attack yourself. And while you can certainly
| make a meta argument against that it would be close
| enough for many not to touch it.
|
| This is why many people leave. Not because it's the
| Internet. Most of us have been around that. But because
| it is bad version of it.
|
| You might think this doesn't have real consequences so I
| will give you an example. Because of the environment on
| Hacker News there is a lack of successful Europeans. This
| in turn results in there being an overwhelming consensus
| that is less likely you make good amounts of money in
| Europe. But this often isn't the case if you know what to
| do. It is just that those who do either leave or stop
| talking about it. Which continues the existing narrative
| as the participants reality continues to match their
| opinions. While in reality their opinion may not really
| be supported.
|
| An environment with one sided environment isn't harmless.
| It might actually give you a worse life. But the same
| argument as before also applies here. Those who
| appreciate this are the first to leave. Leaving those who
| stay blind to what is happening.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I'm out of the loop.
|
| Who is this person and why was he banned?
| ghoward wrote:
| Funny thing: I just wrote about this in my blog. [1] Well, sort
| of.
|
| Many thanks to dang for this ever wonderful forum, the best on
| the Internet!
|
| [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2022/07/lobste.rs-will-become-an-
| ech...
| sneak wrote:
| I've always been grateful and impressed by how kind and
| compassionate and educational @dang's responses to me have been,
| both in public and in private.
|
| He's inspired me to approach many more social interactions that
| I'd historically be annoyed or short with someone as a teaching
| moment that can be, for lack of a better term, leveraged into a
| happy outcome for both participants. It was something I never
| really considered before.
|
| We're all better off for having these interactions with him.
| Thanks so much, Mr. G!
| sph wrote:
| Seeing how @dang handles trolls, delicate topics and inflamed
| egos just made me accept the fact that I will never be such a
| patient person; I truly appreciate how extraordinary their work
| is.
| jl6 wrote:
| The effort has not gone unnoticed here, and it is greatly
| appreciated.
| millzlane wrote:
| Does anyone's career actually rely on being able to participate
| here?
| seydor wrote:
| That's why AI will replace him
| civilized wrote:
| Despite the haters and imperfections, I think HN is about as
| humane as a large, public, globally accessible online community
| could possibly be. It seems like one of those things that
| couldn't possibly last forever because it bucks the statistics of
| human nature too much.
|
| A key move, and an utterly unique one to my knowledge, was having
| an extraordinary full time employee tending to it constantly.
|
| Here's hoping it all lasts for as long as possible. Thanks dang.
| psyc wrote:
| I bet most people who frequent HN grasp it. And who else would?
| password4321 wrote:
| Apparently it takes an outage to prompt peak meta "HN on HN".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Know_What_You_Got_(Til...
| snowwrestler wrote:
| As the saying goes, you never really appreciate what you've
| got[1] until it's gone.
|
| [1] (an unhealthy addiction to an orange website)
| News-Dog wrote:
| Meet the People Taking over Hacker News - by Paul Graham --
| 3/29/2014
|
| https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over...
| fanzhang wrote:
| A lot of replies on twitter critique dang on moderating their
| comments. But in reality, I think this is a good thing. There are
| already enough near-total-free speech zones on the Internet (and
| we see how many of them turn out). It's far more personally
| interesting to me to see how a conversations in a space moderated
| above a certain threshold evolves.
| ratsmack wrote:
| > There are already enough near-total-free speech zones on the
| Internet
|
| You must be referring to Facebook and Twitter.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I haven't seen such a zone in 20 years or so. Care to share a
| link?
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Sounds less Asian than I had assumed.
| EricMausler wrote:
| Long live the benevolent dictator
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| As dang is shadowbanning people, I cannot agree with many of the
| popular sentiments expressed.
|
| I think shadowbanning is unjust, and if is someone is violating
| the rules nonstop they should be made aware of it through notice
| and an actual ban.
| maxbond wrote:
| I've seen dang warn people their conduct is bannable many
| times.
|
| AFAIK shadowbanning on HN means your comments default to
| "dead", as if they had been flagged. You can see them if you
| enable "showdead" in your profile, and if people vouch for
| them, they can become visible again. See Terry Davis' comment
| history for examples (this is the only shadowbanned account I
| know of): https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis -
| if you look a few pages in, you'll see some live comments of
| him talking about the early days of Ticketmaster and such.
|
| To me this seems like a better solution than simply kicking
| people out who are unable to uphold the minimum guidelines
| necessary to engage in reasonably civil discourse. What would
| you suggest as an alternative?
| the_only_law wrote:
| Shadowban is [dead] right?
|
| On rare occasion I've seen [banned] accounts as well with
| showdead on.
|
| Weird thing I've noticed is [dead] accounts that aren green
| tend to be typical troll, spam, or people who can't calm down
| during certain discussions. They may even have some comments
| still love.
|
| [banned] accounts on the other hand tend to be completely
| deragned. They seem almost obsessed. Despite being banned they
| continue to make essay posts about whatever it is that got them
| hanne over large periods of time. Could be bots, but the
| complexity and variety of the language in the posts tends to be
| moderately complex.
| tomcam wrote:
| How else to keep a community stable and civil, where by
| definition civil must contain attributes that will always
| offend some of the audience?
| mephitix wrote:
| He should write a book on moderating online communities.
|
| Not joking, we are trying to build a large online community now
| and I would love to pick his brain on balancing incentives,
| encouraging curiosity, having equanimity, and all kinds of
| aspects in "practical sociology".
|
| I think his in-the-trenches experience would benefit many people
| trying to build and maintain healthy online communities.
|
| Thanks dang!!
| malshe wrote:
| I second this. I have seen so many thriving online communities
| fail in short time because the moderator screwed up. The
| declines of many subreddits are classic examples. Yet, dang has
| successfully managed this community for years. I would like to
| learn from him!
| nimbius wrote:
| I just find it comically ironic that the same community infamous
| for sleuthing and demanding the full root cause of failure from
| their favourite faang darlings and various digital feudal estates
| has been so quiet, forgiving, and reflective about the HN outage
| and its cause. am I missing something? does anyone know what
| caused the failure?
| [deleted]
| arkitaip wrote:
| > quiet, forgiving, and reflective about the HN outage and its
| cause.
|
| If Cloudflare, AWS or Google goes down, it affects millions of
| people directly and often financially. If HN goes down, we
| simply find another way to waste time.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| We weren't quiet. There were lots of questions about the cause
| of the outage... along with detailed answers, and discussions
| of those answers: [1][2][3]
|
| You just missed them.
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026571
|
| [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32030400
|
| [3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32032235
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > You just missed them.
|
| You have a couple errors in the phrase "They were not shoved
| in your face [as seems you prefer]".
|
| I usually try no to do this type of comments (at least here),
| but sometimes I can't help myself.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Thanks for all the posts! In the future, it might be helpful
| to use different (compatible) hardware for the backup server
| so it doesn't have the same issue that caused the main to
| fail, like how redundant aircraft systems are made by
| different teams.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| here's the deal:
|
| HN is a tiny forum which basically runs on a single machine
| with a single backup. There are surely only a few people
| monitoring it. It's used by about ~1 million people a day, and
| nobody really "relies" on HN.
|
| GitHub, Facebook, Google, AWS etc. are massive clusters of over
| 1000 servers spread across continents, with multiple failure
| modes and run by many DevOps. Many people and services rely on
| them being up. They're used by billions each day.
|
| Yet HN has more uptime than these behemoths, and way more
| uptime than e.g. Slack. It's also faster, even though it's only
| one server. HN went down for 2 (?) hours. HN also promptly
| posts why it went down. In this case because both the main and
| backup server failed.
|
| Of course HN is definitely more reliable _because_ it's only
| one server. But it's still impressive and shows that you can
| reach a large audience with a simple setup and few resources.
| Maybe if Google, Facebook, AWS, etc. found more straightforward
| solutions they too could have more uptime.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| It was down for 8 hours.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| "Yet HN has more uptime than these behemoths, and way more
| uptime than e.g. Slack."
|
| That's because HN does a lot less, and is a lot simpler.
| water8 wrote:
| I have a plug-in clock with backup battery that has an
| uptime of always
| vachina wrote:
| > and is a lot simpler
|
| I think that's a feature not a bug.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > That's because HN does a lot less, and is a lot simpler.
|
| Complexity is not a virtue. HN has a lot of depth when you
| look beyond its interface. The abstractions don't always
| have to exist in code, operations or UI.
|
| What % of the Slack feature set is actually used by a
| majority of its users at least once a month?
| civilized wrote:
| HN isn't Amazon or Facebook. It's not a for-profit operation
| relied on by millions for their business. It doesn't have a
| blog where its engineers document the latest way they squeezed
| a few percent more performance. It appears to be a shoestring
| operation run in a frugal fashion.
|
| Why anyone would expect people to have the same attitude
| towards that as Facebook is beyond me.
| hoofhearted wrote:
| They have been super transparent about the HN stack and both
| outages. A disk failed in their collocated server. They
| migrated to their backup server, and lost a disk in that server
| in the same manner.
|
| They temporarily stood up an AWS instance from a backup, and
| are working on a permanent fix.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| It is ironic that HN has not yet been monetized like metafilter
| was.
| vl wrote:
| Look at the URL. It's monetized. HN is a marketing arm of Y
| Combinator. HN contributed significantly to Y Combinator's
| early success.
| mdaniel wrote:
| I believe the occasional YC hiring posts are also part of the
| deal, given the audience that tends to hang out here
|
| I seriously wish the monthly "Who's Hiring" and "Who Wants to
| be Hired?" were a more structured feature of the site, but
| maybe that's the charm of them
| VoidWhisperer wrote:
| My guess is that to some extent, YC benefits from having this
| around in a form people actually want to use - they are able to
| surface the projects they have funded on it and that can help
| drive engagement to those projects. If they attempted to
| monetize the platform itself, it would likely drive away many
| of the users that would otherwise be interested in or be
| possible hires for the companies they fund.
| trollied wrote:
| Thank you for everything you do, dang. Us geeks are an incredibly
| diverse set of people so, by design, a forum that lets them
| communicate with each other is always going to have its
| challenges.
| [deleted]
| waffle_ss wrote:
| I agree with all the asspats for dang on the day-to-day
| moderation level. If anything I'd like to see more of a heavy
| hand from him. I've modded some moderately-sized Reddit subs and
| it was hell.
|
| However, in strategic terms, I think HN has failed to maintain a
| good comment signal-to-noise ratio over the past several years.
| For instance it used to be that "funny" or entertaining type of
| low-effort comments would be strongly discouraged with downvotes;
| at some point in the past few years it has become very common
| and... REminiscent of another social site that I'm not supposed
| to draw comparisons to due to HN guidelines.* Now it's common to
| see jokes and puns do quite well.
|
| Fundamentally, to maintain a board's culture you need to
| encourage people to "lurk more" to get acclimated to the board's
| culture before participating. In other words you need to
| throttle/retard new users' participation somewhat.
|
| I do recall at one point a push to increase commenting by
| removing comment average karma in user profiles. (Some) people
| used to withhold commenting unless they felt they had a real
| banger because it would throw off their ratio. It also used to be
| new user signups were only open occasionally rather than always
| available.
|
| My hypothesis on where it went wrong is cost-free upvotes.
| Downvotes have always been gated behind a karma threshold, but
| any new account can upvote whatever it wants. Floods of new
| accounts thoughtlessly upvoting the types of comments they upvote
| on other sites will easily outpace the old timers' downvotes on
| that same content. Over time, this small change in karma dynamics
| shifts the board culture.
|
| * Like the guideline wording, dang frequently brushes away this
| critique out of hand, but as someone who goes long periods
| between visiting HN regularly, it's very obvious to me. I think
| you could quantify it if you took random samples of HN comments
| from various time slices and noted the quantity of low-effort
| comments.
| clairity wrote:
| disheartened, as usual, to see an insightful comment lurking
| nearer the bottom of the page than the top, while a bunch of
| throwaway fawnings sit above it[0]. i have a pet theory that
| there can only ever be about a dozen good comments on a thread,
| and hn usually does a terrible job surfacing them. the (poor)
| karma-to-tenure ratio you describe is certainly one of the
| mechanisms by which this goes wrong. i actually liked
| slashdot's voting mechanics the best of all the forums i've
| ever visited. it wasn't perfect, but did a better job at
| surfacing good comments.
|
| i've actually been thinking about how to solve this problem
| lately, at least for myself. the hn api doesn't look like much
| fun to work with however.
|
| [0]: that's not to say that i don't appreciate dang, i do, but
| it's _cloying_ to say the least.
| O__________O wrote:
| Already thanked Dang here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026736
|
| But it's worth noting per Dang that sctb played role in building
| the data recovery system before it was needed -- and mthurman
| helped deploy HN to AWS. Thanks sctb & mthurman!!
|
| Dang's comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031158
|
| For who sctb & mthurman are, see:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32033413
| ebcase wrote:
| I hope he's well-compensated for the job?
| sph wrote:
| Either that or he's a massive masochist to want to moderate
| full-time a horde of unruly nerds like us.
| anewpersonality wrote:
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-09 23:02 UTC)