I don't think most people grok exactly how difficult moderation is, and how that difficulty doesn't just scale, but rather evolves fundamentally as a community grows. Moderating a smaller community is sort of like setting a certain tone within your group of friends and figuring out ways to encourage them to follow suit. Moderating huge communities is more like designing a judicial branch.

For what it's worth, I think HN is one of the best examples of successful moderation. The team balances their roles as curators and moderators well, they seem to work hard at intellectual honesty in their policy design, and they do a fantastic job of combatting marketing schemes and bots. No doubt there are areas where I don't entirely enjoy HN, but by and large it is the most consistently enjoyable community of its size for me.

"Don't show me anything said by someone who joined after I did". "Show only <person, writing on topic> pairs with historical ratings above this threshold from raters in the weighted set generated by crawling thusly from this seed set." "Prioritize anything on topic X which multiple people from this set like." At 8am: "Don't show me anything this classifier thinks is a pun"; 8pm: "Show me puns, please". "Show me anything the author thinks is good, if their self-evaluation rating on the topic meets the following criteria." "Don't show me anything dang rates as not meeting criteria X".

Even USENET 30 years ago had people sharing kill files (don't show me comments whose headers match [patterns]). They weren't sufficient to check eternal September, but we can do better now. It seems like there's a rich design space available here that we've not been exploring. What am I missing?

My goal of reading others is to discuss with my "antiself" to quote CS Lewis and the linked OP.

I would fall into an echo chamber, amplifying and reinforcing what I already think. That is not good for me.

Alternatively if externally I continue to grow and change, depending on the rate of change, the pattern would provide more and more mismatching results.

In essence we are back to the same problem. I do not know think this can be automated in a simplistic way.

As one grows, one's taste in say book selections changes, so why not in filter patterns and associated readings?

I don't know if it would be helpful by giving people more information, or detrimental by giving people more information on why their comment was downvoted.

Yes I have so much hesitation where I am curious about someone’s fringe viewpoint but DO NOT want to be swamped with more of the same

As with Nest, there's an architectural privacy challenge. You'd like your pa to have insights like "oh, your interests on topic X align closely with other-person, so let's see, maybe you'd like thing too?". Ideally using local or trusted computes. But you don't in general want other-person's pa to know all your things. So perhaps an ecology of trusted visibility? Your pa can run parts of itself on a bonded site, with greater visibility than it would have locally, but with restrictions on what it can report back? But that's hairy and hard. So...?

What you're proposing seems very similar to blocking people who you feel shouldn't be allowed to contribute.

"...forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society ..."

I'm obviously exaggerating my point, but this snippet of a definition feels appropriate.

Then there's a customization problem. "Following this blog post, I installed the hn-isnt-reddit style, added the extended-debate-is-wonderful plugin policy, and configured them to ... ".

You probably don't want to get new ideas directly from 100 of sources but new ideas filtered trough trusted people. From time to time it is good to get someone new and give it a shot, but most of the time it is better to stick to known group. Unless your group is about drugs and alcohol only then maybe just change the group.

https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...

... and, more generally, "Wherever something is wrong, something is too big" (L. Kohr).

It seems to be many people could agree on this. When a community grows, most of the time old members would start to struggle about the problem.

I wonder, could there be a design where it is a typical community, then when enough old or hardcore members realized this and believe this is no good it would trigger a threshold, they can vote to fork or diverge to a new community? This is a repeatable process, and then there would be multiple communities with different vibes where everyone can enjoy.

People come to these places for various reasons:

- To debate

- To learn

- To engage intellectually with other people

- To be heard/validated

- To gain social standing

The problem is (like all human forums) that as the included population rises, you need to make a bigger and bigger splash to be heard, and that means that after awhile only the loudest are heard anymore.

As a species, we're not fully evolved for big crowds, so it's no wonder that our social graces fall apart after we get too big. The solution throughout the ages has been to leave the "bad" forum and build our own forum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-94qrgxH35M).

This is called Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September If everyone is allowed to join, and there is little moderation, there is reversion to the mean aka reversion to mediocrity.

You need really strict moderation to keep the quality up. One of my favourite subreddits is /r/AskHistorians It's generally useless to post anything but question into the comments there because the quality of discussion is so high.

Ok, there's one thing that seems to last: the linux desktop never takes off. Some people bemoan this, I like it. It means that the Linux I love won't go away...not just yet, anyway. Every year that linux fails to popularize on the desktop is another year I don't have to go looking for a new niche tool that will do what I want instead of what its creators want.

edit: typos

I may encounter a nice article that I want to send to the management of my company for example, I refrian from doing this immediatly. Instead I leave the tab open and after a couple of hours I refresh en the top comment are almost always insightful and either reinforce my choice to send the article or make me decide not to.

On sites like Reddit the first 2 or 3 top level comments are puns, sarcastic one liners or a variation on the current meme.

Or it might be a matter of etiquette: the same user on HN upvotes the smart comment and then goes on Reddit and upvotes the dismissive and overused quip.

The demographics is different. Reddit audience is 50% random teenagers and 90% teens + college students -- browsing on an app looking for quickly-consumed content. HN is probably majority people slacking off at work and hence more "mature"...

(It doesn't hurt that dang will just delete the content-free pun/meme comments when people get tempted to up-vote them.)

I think we may be starting to overstate the "Dunbar argument." In some sense, including the position in "Sapiens," operating in large groups is the key trait of Homo Sapiens... That which eventually made us unique and allowed us to become what we are. It is in YNH's view what

These aren't really opposing views. Large groups are suboptimal. We obviously struggle with the downsides of large group size and these dynamics are often our bottleneck.

The nuance is: An organism can be highly evolved to tolerate something that is outside its optimal range. A fish might be evolved to tolerate really low oxygen. That lets them live where other fish can't, less competition. But... that same fish's "optimal range" for health or whatnot might be different. Same with temperature, where I think most of the research is.

Interestingly, this way of thinking has lead me to stop reading user names a lot of the time.

birds, fishes, insects

basically some kind of hive mind

I'm going to dare say it but Hackernews is no longer really populated by hackers, or at least it's not bleeding edge when it comes to programming.

One example... the number of posts like "Show HN: Here's a thing I made" ... where the first comments is "Here's a link to a product that has been out for 10+ years that does what you just built and 100 times more"

My gut feeling is the hackers still here have aged, and aren't doing much in the way of real programming any more. And HN isn't really attracting the next generation... I could be wrong... needs data to prove.

A second big crowd is devs, mostly web devs.

Hackers in the archetypical sense wouldn't upvote posts about Rails, JS, Golang, Rust and stuff, they'd upvote posts about coding things, making stuff, and computing intricasies...

Once upon a time it was clever things you could do with hardware. Like how Carmack figured out how to do smooth side-scrolling on EGA hardware, leading to Commander Keen.

These days, it seems a hack is often duct-taping together a bunch of third-party stuff, often for visual effect. E.g. connecting a database of some kind to a map, or a funky visualization. With a broader audience online, something that relates to a wider audience gets more traction.

I think there is overlap between both of these kinds of hack and startups, but the overlap is bigger with the latter kind. Building a business using as many shortcuts as you can, leveraging what other people built, is much more efficient than doing almost everything yourself, which is what was required in the early days. The early days was about exploiting hardware; these days, it's about exploiting existing software and data.

Detailed posts about languages and libraries isn't really hack territory IMO, unless they're exploits of some kind.

When I browse, it's a mix between the two groups and a third group that upvotes and engages with the post you said "hackers in the archetypical sense" would.

(The timezone thing is starting to become my stock reply; when I browse the semi-regular threads of how HN is going downhill or no longer populated by hackers, half of the claims disagree with my daily experience on this site. Can't explain it in any other way.)

Of course you would say that, given your username!

So? With the number of people who have access to development tools it's hard to build something that doesn't already exist. I think it's a shame that when someone shares something the first reaction is to shoot them down by saying it already exists, but it's helpful to give the OP and others an idea of what's already out there

"Show HN: Here's my first program"

    10 PRINT "My Name"
    20 GOTO 10

Interesting. I never though the "News" part meant much at all. A substantial portion of the links that get highly upvoted here, and attract active discussion, are actually quite old.

To my mind, the main "thing" is that submissions be interesting (for some definition of "interesting"), not that they be "news".

I guess it just goes to show how different people can look at the exact same thing and interpret it differently.

And I can see how participating too much can be unhealthy. It's easy to start obsessively refreshing, searching for something new. It's easy to get drawn into silly arguments that don't really matter, or lengthy discussions of semantics that don't really help uncover some new truth. But the benefit of the back-catalog cannot exist if there aren't people who share their wisdom, so I hope enough people continue to contribute.

That's not a very flattering thing to say. I do the same as you. Yesterday I wanted information about Monero and did the site: trick with good results.

What I find annoying is the partisan chilling effect. Not just discussions about politics, that I try to avoid because I know it's doomed. But about anything. There is a front-page technical programming discussion where I started to compose a comment and gave up, thinking that it would be downvoted as hell, not because it's outrageus or false, just unpopular opinion.

Puzzled I checkd the FAQ, which led me to the guidelines and there I found the magic:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

So politics is mercifully off-topic by design.

check them out: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And yet, in spite of Hacker News' disdain for both politics and repetition, any story about Julian Assange, including daily posts about his hearing, will remain untouched[0].

What's really off topic isn't politics, but politics HN doesn't agree with.

[0]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You're overgeneralizing based on the special case of the extradition trial. Arguably that was over-covered here, but it was hardly because of the sinister situation you're imagining. We just weren't following it very closely.

The principles of how we moderate political topics on HN are well established:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

The principles of how people arrive at inaccurate generalizations about it are also well established:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

If there's any aspect of this problem that hasn't been thoroughly discussed and answered at those links, I'd like to know what it is.

One could say that many Trump stories are "hacker politics" because of Trump's unprecedented use of social media, and the effect that social media as a whole has had on the American political landscape since his election, leading to the "fake news" phenomenon and controversies about the influence of social media platforms and their ability to manipulate public perception. The investigations into Trump's relationship with Russia, Wikileaks and the DNC leaks certainly touch on "hacker" themes and Assange specifically. And a strong case could be made that stories about gender and racial disparity in tech and programming count as "hacker politics."

Yet again, many such stories are more likely to be flagged than anything to do with Assange exclusively. "hacker politics" is not the standard actually being applied here, rather it's aggregate political bias. Do you think a story about, say, an Antifa or BLM hacking group would stand on technical merit alone?

Stories about "the effect that social media as a whole has had on the American political landscape" could be on-topic. That doesn't necessarily make US politics in general on-topic.

Stories about "the influence of social media platforms and their ability to manipulate public perception" could be on-topic. That doesn't necessarily make stories about "fake news" in general on-topic.

Stories about the Wikileaks organisation could be on-topic. That doesn't necessarily make stories derived from the contents of particular leaks on-topic.

Stories about the DNC data leak could be on-topic. That doesn't necessarily make stories derived from the contents of the DNC data leak on-topic.

Stories about gender and racial disparity in tech and programming could be on-topic. That doesn't necessarily make stories about gender and racial disparity in general on-topic.

Stories about an Antifa or BLM hacking group could be on-topic. That doesn't neccessarily make stories about Antifa or BLM in general on-topic.

Personally, I don't find this distinction particularly hard. As for "bias", I've seen sentiments on this site that could broadly be categorised as Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green, etc. Of course, there is a heavy political bias, but I'd say it's generally just "US-centric" (which is to be expected, as this is a US site); e.g. as a UK citizen I find some of the comments very bizarre (usually anything involving guns, healthcare, abortion, etc.). It can still be interesting, and if not I can just collapse the thread or close the page.

I land a fair bit of content on the front page, but also submit a lot. Many of my successful items are surprises, much of what I'd like to see take hold doesn't. I'll submit certain ‘beats‘ of interest regularly (different items), hopefully without becoming too polemical. I also scan 'new' upvoting items of interest frequently. I'll nominate items from others for the 2nd chance queue (email the mods).

The Assange story is complex, has always been inherently political, and those politics have dhifted, as has awareness of interactions and consequences. Assange was always controversial. Many who'd once admired his work, and who can point to specific good acts and valuable releases, are also now skeptical of his intentions and connections. Myself among them.

But items concerning him and his case(s) can still be submitted.

I think it might be that a few upvotes around submission time might be the deciding factor.

It would be interesting if there was an algorithm that would statistically separate upvotes from "number of eyeballs on the site" somehow.

maybe something like:

- 100 people saw this subject - maybe toward top of page = more likely count as "see" - of that x% upvoted it - make it more visible

I found a couple of examples, as well as comments by others who've noticed the same issue. I'm not trawling through the archives to try to make an exhaustive list, though.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24296079

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24504297

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24667006

[3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24610890

[4]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22147116

[5]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24291582

[6]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23677740

These links seem to me to point to a system that is working reasonably well, the main problem with which is that people say a lot of untrue things about it. That's inevitable—people say a lot of untrue things in general. I don't think it's possible to do better than 'reasonably well', for many reasons, including: there's too much randomness, we don't see everything, and a lot of these situations are lose-lose.

If you're suggesting that we should just have political free-for-alls on HN, that is quite impossible—HN would not survive it. If you're not suggesting that, it's unclear to me what your complaint is. Too much Assange? Everyone thinks that HN has too much of $something.

How we moderate politics on HN is well-established, and clearly explained at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you or anyone have a better idea, I'd love to hear it, but please make sure that you've familiarized yourself with past explanations first. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already answered many times why it won't work.

I still find HN to be one of the most politics-free places on the Internet, which is nice. Granted, I avoid almost everything that talks about US computer programmers vs the rest of the world computer programmers, discussions which tend to have not that nice xenophobic nuance to them, but the rest of the discussions are pretty civil.

Also (and of course), I also avoid almost everything related to Apple-Google-Tesla, the conflict of interests in here are too big (lots of Apple/Google employees, lots of owners of Tesla shares), so I realise that nothing productive can come out of those conversations. Surprisingly, I find that Microsoft employees are a lot more open to criticism, and I say that as a person who used to dislike MS massively (I still hold them partly responsible for the failure of OLPC)

That's not the same thing as a specific POV or catechism: the demographic actively seeks novel answers and ideas in certain ways so long as larger assumptions remain unchallenged, and even then the right framing can work wonders. It's the demographic that remains consistent, even predictable. The position of this demographic isn't always a given.

Maybe it's OK downvoting comments because they're factually wrong. But this has become downvoting comments because the downvoter has a different opinion. As soon as there is a very popular opinion, you can't even state facts that contradict that opinion without being downvoted.

I'm not here to promote some agenda. If I find uneasy to express an opinion, I just shut up, I don't lose anything personally.

Edit: if you really want, you can pass a comment through the barrier, with a lot of pre-emptive disclaimers and anticipating objections, seven paragraphs of socratic explanations and trying to sound so erudite as to seed a doubt to the knee-jerk downvoter. Too much work for simple stuff.

Of I course I myself feel that I have been unfairly downvoted in the past, but I do have a more strict rule for when I would downvote someone than most people seem to have. On the other hand all my upvotes have been 100% totally deserved, I'm just lucky that way.

DuckDuckGo has the !hn bang for searching in the algolia page, so just stick it to the end of your query instead of site:news.ycombinator.com and you are good to go!

Will I stay forever? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. I have left many communities; some, in which I enjoyed some status. They all hurt, but I have always gotten to the point where I no longer miss them. I barely ever visit Facebook. I have to maintain an account, because I’m a senior figure in a tech group there, but I find the community to be a bit corrosive to my personal sense of well-being. So, months ago, I stopped doing anything more than brief daily checks for posts in the group. I pretty much never read Twitter.

In fact, this is really the only social media in which I participate. I have many accounts, but most are there as “placeholders.”

I do try to be a “good citizen,” by following the rules and walking away, when I feel like all I would bring is darkness, and I will occasionally remove or revise comments that I feel are not productive.

I know that I come across as a “stuffed shirt,” but one reason is that it’s important for me to be fairly careful about what I put out there. I have been...pithy, in the past.

I’m also fairly good at apologizing. That’s because I get a lot of practice.

This was an extraordinarily poignant quote that I empathize with greatly. The only reason I’m sharing it as a comment is because I believe that I can now also gain some karma with it as well.

What does this mean? Are these the beginning signs of an addiction to fake internet points?

I think it’s dangerous to make comments just for karma. Then you will be less likely to take risks.

Karma is nice to have for me. If I post something, and see my karma go up by 10 points, I think “oh that’s nice”, but I don’t then go to “how do I get 20 the next time”? Likewise if it goes down 10 points, I think “wow some people didn’t like my comment, oh well”. In the end my karma is generally trending up, which I take to mean I’m generally adding more than I’m detracting. If it was generally trending down, I might consider if I’m coming across wrong / being misunderstood , or maybe something is wrong with the people here!

Also if you want more karma, just repost old posts that got a lot of votes, like the OP did :D. Likely to at least some votes esp if still relevant.

Interesting perspective. One of the easiest ways to gain karma from comments is writing a "The article gets it completely wrong. Here's why..." type comment[1]. HN highly rewards this kind of comment. Discussion after discussion is riddled with them. It might help to exemplify taking risks in the space of possible comments. There are a number of interesting axes in this space.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JadeColoredGlass...

Later, it turned into more of an agree-disagree vote.

Posting comments might be easier if you don't have a source for new links. Again, if you have a pulse on HN, it's not too hard. You don't even have to lie, just slant your take to appeal to the audience. HN loves clever hacks, cynicism, free speech, definite statements. Often times it's better to be a little bit wrong because your comment will attract a lot of rebuttals trying to correct you.

On karma points (roughly how aligned is the individual's signaling with the group's signaling), it's useful to the individual for calibrating their (outputted) opinions to better align with the group's. That was a critical piece of surviving as a social creatures.

https://sealedabstract.com/rants/hey-programmers-we-need-to-...

It resonates with me because I often find myself scrolling HN when I was meaning to be working on a project, both at work and at home.

I'd wager most of us have needed a break at some point. I myself have gone through at least 4 accounts since 2006. I periodically "delete" them by setting minaway to 999999999. The act of starting over with a new account with zero fake internet points does help keep their value in perspective, though.

[0] https://hackerer.news/

All this karma circlejerking is getting boring. Nothing gets done.

What is sth?

[0]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sth

Probably.

I wonder if karma was hidden from us if it would do something to curb this compulsiveness. Seeing instant feedback, a number going up or down is very stimulating compared to nothing, or even a very broad "over 0/under 0" status as a middle ground.

You can still get the "over/under 0" because posts under zero get progressively grayed out the farther under zero they go.

1. It doesn't become an addictive slot machine that updates every minute.

2. The conversations have already happened, which makes it easier to see which threads are interesting and informative and which are not.

It also uses an outline.com like style for the articles, which removes the tracking and spamming and places the focus on the articles itself.

It's still in active development and so far I've only used it myself, so all feedback is welcome!

Ps. It’s an PWA, so you can add it to your homescreen and use it like an app.

But what you do is provide a line of minus signs (-) at the top left that grows and shrinks with the tree and at any time I can click one of these to collapse a parent post! This is great! Being a UX aficionado I am tickled that you have not only seen the same pain, but found an elegant solution for it. Well done!

What percentage of this problem would that fix?

I have poured too many hours of my life into this little detail. It still doesn't work great though:

1. It is hard to click on on mobile devices

2. It sometimes renders behind the comment or is not clickable (not always, just sometimes). I am afraid this has something to do with the way browsers render the CSS sticky position, so I might not be able to fix this. I am not very experienced in CSS though, so if you've any advice on how to fix this I would truly appreciate it!

Because of the above two issues I might need to go back to just a fixed minus button. :(

If you click on the second minus sign on the left, it collapses the conversation up to that parent without having to scroll up to that level.

I am afraid that it is an issue with the way some browsers render the CSS sticky position. If you have any CSS knowledge, I would greatly appreciate your input!

For my information, which browser do you use?

Also any chance you'd share the source for this?

There is even a movement that thinks building a HN reader is "A spiritual successor to TodoMVC".[1] I don't know if that is of any interest to you but I thought leave that here.

[1] https://hnpwa.com/

Unfortunately I won't be able to submit the project to https://hnpwa.com since they only allow (more or less) direct copies of HackerNews to their directory. [1]

[1] https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news-pwas

E.g. the main page is always 'yesterday', so for me it shows the posts that were posted between 00:00 and 23:59 on Wednesday, but if its already Friday where you are it will show the top posts of Thursday.

I like the outline.com article style, and also discovered outline.com in the process.

I am not a huge fan of the layout for the comments, it feels a bit too big for me and a bit hard to follow along, as it switches between authors and so on, but that might just be a personal preference.

You should probably consider making it open-source as it is definitely the type of project I would like to contribute to!

Thank you for building this!

I don't see that. When click on the articles, it is just going to the articles. Otherwise ,it is really nice and I do like the idea of it not becoming an addictive slot machine.

In the same style, I like to use the "top 10/20" on https://hckrnews.com/

  DOMException: Failed to execute 'appendChild' on 'Node': This node type does not support this method.
    at Object.appendChild (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:41326)
    at m (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:54249)
    at v (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:53880)
    at _ (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:54335)
    at P (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:57721)
    at P (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:57656)
    at f.__patch__ (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:58133)
    at f.t._update (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:35072)
    at f.r (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:65536)
    at _n.get (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:27248)

"Peer’s Certificate issuer is not recognized."

I think HN has provided me with enough benefit through meeting people on the platform that I'm keeping it around, but the author makes great points nonetheless.

On Reddit even a percieved differing opinion results in hate mail, insulting and shouting. It's one of the reasons I never signed up to Twitter.

And there isn’t even a proverbial nugget in the turd to make it worth it.

This guy posts cool, obscure Mario trivia: https://twitter.com/MarioBrothBlog

A wiki about cut content in old games retweets cool new finds: https://twitter.com/CuttingRoomWiki

This non-profit posts articles about classic gaming: https://twitter.com/GameHistoryOrg

Oh and the Homestar Runner guys started making content again, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/StrongBadActual

There's lots of nuggets. It's not even hard to find them among all the shit. If you're following someone whose content you don't like, just stop following them. One big tip I wish was more obvious is that you can turn off retweets from specific people you follow. So if someone posts cool content themselves, but also retweets a bunch of political trash, you can get the former without any of the latter.

On the old reddit at least (stopped using after the new launch), if I went to /r/technology I’d only see /r/technology and that was pure nuggets. You could also unsub any default subreddits

Facebook unfortunately doesn’t have vibe where people You trust can jump in and provide an insightful thread. It’s just stacked piles of trolling and baiting. Its only saving grace is keeping in touch with family and friends who don’t use any other platforms.

Many communities start out nice and well meaning, but at some point devolve into a Wild West. HN did not, and I think that’s thanks to dang’s moderation (and pg’s at an earlier time)

Also, “small” things like dropping the vote counts, and having canonical rules for titles (which are, as pg noted, a “commons” but treated in other platforms as a land grab) reduces competition and bragging rights. Doesn’t seem like much, but it’s part of what keeps the people looking for conversation here, and those looking mostly for signaling and gratification out.

Mies’ work wasn’t without flaws or detractors, but then compare one of his subtle, perfected masterworks to the infinite cheap and nasty boxes that leveraged only the sketch outline of his style.

Now translate that into any field, absolutely including online community building. There’s no question where HN stands.

Also the really controversial topics tend to get flagged.

Facebook and Twitter desperately need moderation - but they're built completely differently and much larger. Moderation there will immediately be compared to censorship, which Twitter and FB are afraid of because it threatens their money.

We're so afraid of one good idea being hidden by moderation that we allow thousands of bad ideas - which eventually create a hive-mind and drive out the good ideas anyway.

I try to take down voted comments on the chin (and one of mine at -4 was absolutely warranted) but at other times it can be dis-heartening to see a comment being down-voted for no apparent reason.

I guess the answer is to not be too vain / overlly bothered about my Karma points but just as a highly upvoted comment feed the reward centres so do down votes in a whole different way.

Oh, and responsible and thoughtful use of down-voting rights please.

It's one thing to downvote an opinion, but downvoting anyone who questions an opinion, or clarification?!

- the "celebs" (anyone which is moderately famous)

- the "old school" (which usually forms tight groups and doesn't get as much hate mail)

- the newcomers (anyone that joined, let's say < 5yr ago). Those are mostly wallowing in a pit of sadness

Not saying either of you are wrong. Just saying they are different issues.

For example r/AskHistorians have amazing quality content due to very strict moderation.

I do suspect many might be subscribing to forums that invite a bit wider discussions, and that this brings out more commenters but also less technically viable comments. I mainly use reddit / HN for RSS filtering, so is more interested in the news, but always check comments for interesting counterpoints and tips.

In any case, I think most of us have felt what the writer here feels, about HN or some other forum. It's hard to know how much of it is internal to us & how much of it is the forum. I mean, as we hang out someplace, it becomes old to us. Cliches become trite. Insights become banal. Patterns become annoyance triggers. All stuff that tends to show up in these "sick of this" endpoints.

What made me think of it here is the first "bad argument:"

"Arguments that reduce to a disagreement about semantics"

While I agree that this is a bad argument, it's a pretty common one anytime anything abstract is discussed. Even professional philosophers exchanging letters, debating on podcasts or publishing in journals succumb to semantics disturbingly often.

To me, I might get drawn into some topic/debate and eventually conclude that it's just boring semantics. At that point, the whole thing annoys me whenever it comes up. This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni.

I don't know if it matters to the individual, but to forum designers it might have opposite implications. If it's the forum that changes for the worse, a cultural defence is the right approach. If it's the person who changes, then the solution is an evolving forum. It's also hard to get feedback on this. I can't imagine many forums ever avoid this sort of sentiment from arising.

..no conclusion.

I think it works like this:

blindspots are so hard to see, but if they are inconvenient, they will get pushback. great effort will be spent creating counter-arguments i.e. arguments against, but not so much arguments for. Effort will be spent repeating them so these counterarguments will become well-known, and accepted.

Soon enough, there will be a lamp-shade effect; there are so many counter-arguments people will wonder if the value they see is something is real because they only hear talk of the harm of something, not the value; everyone thinks it's harmful, but no one speaks of the value. Soon enough, it becomes harder to defend something, and this means the path-of-least-resistance is to not defend something, or to attack those that try. Anyone defending it has to adopt a "contrarian" style and tone, and sometimes hedge a little with "provocateur" behaviour to give themselves an out in case things come back on them (I wasn't really serious, lol).

I personally hate so-called "identity politics" because it gives people a personal, group-identity stake in things that not only bias their perspective, but often add a strong emotive current to topics that fuels the creation of stigmas and taboos as above.

> This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni.

I did philosophy at uni. OMG stay away from the continental stuff. The (often American aka logical positivists) stuff that intersected with logic and mathematics was great though, although much of it seemed to be a study in semantics/language/meaning.

Check out Rudolf Carnaps "philosophical nonsense" stuff:

  Such metaphysical sentences—into which we can be misled by the logical shortcomings of natural languages—are revealed to be pseudo-sentences by logical analysis. They are nonsense, in the sense of not having any theoretical content; they are not answers to any coherently expressible questions.

This is why I'll never understand people who are crazy about <insert political candidate here>. No matter who they are, they will do something you disagree with. It's much easier to recognize what they did is wrong if you were never part of their group to start. Instead, I see people twisting themselves in knots to defend positions they would normally denounce.

And not just too single out politics, but I see the same thing with companies (like Apple). I also don't want to sound holier than thou either, since I've recognized it in myself before. This joining a tribe is part of the human condition, so it's something I have to actively fight against.

This is actually a rational behaviour (in an f-ed up system/incentive).

Any admittance of failure will be used against your candidate, and the opposition will defend their candidate just as strongly. Consider how when celebs get involved in scandals their PR isn't always to admit fault.

Its the same thing of "repeat a lie enough.."; even if the defence itself is not accepted, it can still soften the blow of the scandal by resisting the death-blow of unanimous condemnation. Humans are sometimes herd creatures, visible support is a universal defence in itself, even if only to threaten/dissuade attackers.

In other words, this is how political theatre works.

I would like to take a stab at explaining why an argument being "boring semantics" or "interesting philosophy" is somewhat dependent on perspective.

To be explicit about definitions I take "semantics" to mean "mapping from words/sentences to a concrete meaning" and "arguing semantics" to mean "Arguing what mapping is correct or agreeing on a shared mapping".

To give a concrete example of an argument (from the article):

> Abortion is the canonical example of this type of argument: once you have decided what “life” is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one.

Deciding what "life" is by my definitions a purely semantic argument. As you try to define "life", you will want to keep almost universally agreed upon statements such as "Human life has inherent value" coherent. Some of the simplest definitions will raise issues if you start considering future and past humans. There are some interesting questions that you can try to answer by defining "life" and following the logical consequences. However, if you are only interested in abortion, most of the subtly of a definition of "life" is not relevant.

So if you are interested in only the first question you ask, arguing semantics can be a deep rabbit hole, but if you are willing to entertain new questions as you primary question, it can be interesting as its own study.

OTOH, I do think that there are different levels of "bogged down in semantics."

Semantics can sometimes interesting in their own right. That's rarely a help though. The semantics are generally not interesting as used to try and win a debate.

Getting back to the original point, I think the semantic arguments are usually the shallower ones. That's not bad in itself, but being a bog, moving past semantics is a rarity once in. That tends to get annoying and boring faster than rehashing a repetitive but substantive discussion.

Say we're discussing the existence of god. "What if I consider god to be the universe itself?" might be interesting on first pass, but it's kind of boring by the third time. Environmental sustainability. It might be interesting to reflect on the etymology or politics of the term "sustainable" in the context it's used today. It rarely gets us to a more nuanced view though. Usually, it just keeps the debate in shallow water. what does the word "really" mean. What words should we use.

As I said, I think it's important to keep in mind that there is no escape. Professional philosophers get stuck in semantics regularly. OTOH, a forum is probably somewhat susceptible to shallowness (semantics are just one type) regardless. After all, it's a casual medium.

The past 20 years of the internet has been one big experiment in human communities where interactions are faceless and it has becoming increasingly difficult to imagine who you're speaking to. It's also often impossible to guess how many people will see what you post and much much harder to guess what kind of people will want to discuss it. How can you have a meaningful discussion with so little context?

In the past, communities like HN had a much more homogeneous user base and, like the article talks about, had a much narrower focus for discussion (i.e. more focused around CS). They also had fewer overall users.

I wonder if we need to redefine "internet scale" to include some organic constraints on healthy and well functioning human interactions. The social sciences might be somewhat woolly on that question but that's not to say such constraints don't exist (Dunbar's number being the best example).

Boundless community growth clearly doesn't work well. There have to be alternatives worth exploring.

However, smart trolls (of which HN also has plenty) learn to adapt to the local culture. HN will often permit trolling as long as it's civil, and the mods won't ban an account that posts frequent troll comments if it also sometimes posts high quality comments.

I'd guess he has some resentment of increasingly polarised discussions (and maybe procrastination by users?); I've run a forum for 10+ years and resent a lot of the trends in the way people talk to each other, and I certainly read/post a lot less on my own site as a result. Or could just be changes in priorities in having children?

I've long suspected that he and/or a small subset of valued users have migrated somewhere else, even if to a private Slack/similar. Often feels like some past regulars are missing.

The next generation of HN readers are being prepped for the role of a corporate servant, not that of a hacker entrepreneur. Those of us who remember how things used to be are having a hard time adjusting to the reality that the opportunities are all gone, we missed the boat and we are told to line up with the juniors and prepare for a life of bureaucratic corporate servitude.

The great tragedy of the situation is that those of us who are left behind and still participate in HN are probably some of the most persistent, hard working, ambitious and most skilled (struggle is the best teacher) entrepreneurs/hackers in existence - We're still waiting for our first opportunity and it's looking like we will never get it.

I consider what is now considered innovation and entrepreneurism, overrated juvenile, and mostly hurtful.

The fact that people don't agree with you, doesn't mean they are against you, or try to protect their power by holding you back. They may just think differently than you.

I've grown a cynical perception of the startup scene not because I hate innovation, or want to preserve status quo - it's because I love innovation, but all I keep seeing is startups arbitraging whatever random potential gradient they can find on the market. For every true innovation like people shipping medical supplies via UAVs in developing countries, there's many more startups that just try to suck on the sweet flow of adtech money, or to make cash arbitraging laws and social trust.

The way I feel about both entrepreneurship and corporations these days: we've refined the ways of making money down to science, but in the process, we've got self-referential. We've lost sight of the big picture: that all that activity is meant to do something useful in the real world. And what's less hackery than self-serving innovation, where the actual thing being done is the free variable, and the only goal is to redirect the flow of dollars?

So basically, instead of subdividing by interesting-content-type, subdivide by healthy-community-type. This might solve the problem of when communities get too large, without creating a lifeless echo-chamber of endless up-votes.

You're suggesting echo-chambers. I don't think that's a good idea. How are you supposed to see a different viewpoint if all you do is talk to like-minded folks?

It would allow posts with hundreds of comments to be a bit more organized?

There is a tension... between the core audience ageing and evolving, and the forum staying still. If the forum evolves too then it is less accessible to newer people, if it stays stagnant it drives away the core as it doesn't keep track with their growth.

Those forums that walk a middle path extend the life of the forum the longest, at the risk of excluding some original members and being slightly less accessible... but overall good for all.

The real key to it is not preserving the forums themselves but to preserve the connections people make... to split larger communities into multiple communities when they get too big so that they continue to serve each audience and those who navigate across those audiences will do so.

I'm not a believer in the Reddit model of subreddits as I think communities need a stronger identity of their own, an independence and freedom to be whatever they will be... rather than a micro-clone of the parent and still living at home with the parent.

What should be easier: Creating and running forums, cheaply, by yourself or hosted, and driving engagement around an interest. If the cost (mental, time, $$$) for this is massively reduced then it becomes easier to create forums and split large struggling communities into smaller thriving ones... in total the audience increases, but there's a natural limit to what a single forum can do.

All the more so when they are used to, in effect, remove comments by making downvoted comments more difficult to read.

Now, I can understand the idea of making it easier to navigate through many comments by crowd-sourcing a metric of each comment's 'value', but in practice this is extremely difficult to do while preserving the diversity of views. It usually ends up being the "tyranny of the majority".

That particular aspect of the moderation system sounds good on paper, but was rather useless in practice.

Essentially, what "matters" is that people are upvoting or downvoting a particular post. Theoretically, it's good to have a bit of additional metadata telling us why they're doing it: i.e., do they find the post Funny, Insightful, or Informative?

In practicality, it's not that useful, or at least it wasn't put to any practical use by Slashdot when I stopped reading it back in the 2000's. At a moment's glance, it's pretty trivial to see why people might've upvoted a particular post - it's clearly meant to be funny, or it has a lot of informative links, etc. So the metadata of "why" was just redundant.

On the other hand, I suppose the metadata could have been put to some practical use after all. For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" [1] and "Insightful" [2] replies on Slashdot and to focus on the most "Informative" [3] ones. I don't remember the interface allowing you to do that. Perhaps they added it later, or perhaps it's something you might explore in your own system.

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[1] I mean, one can only read so many "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of THOSE!" jokes before one wants to jump off of a bridge.

[2] In my experience, 99% of the "Insightful" comments were just those that forcefully/eloquently regurgitated FOSS talking points that resonated well with established Slashdot groupthink. "Insightful" upvotes tended to mean "I agree with the author of this comment" and not "wow, actual new insights are presented here." Perhaps this might have been avoided if there was a separate "I agree with this" upvote method, distinct from "Insightful."

[3] It was easy to farm for karma this way; if you stumbled upon a recent Slashdot article without many replies, you could throw a few easily-Googled relevant links into a reply and be assured of getting a bunch of "Informative" votes. Nonetheless, while imperfect, the replies deemed "Informative" had a decent signal-to-noise ratio relative to the rest of the replies.

The interface did indeed allow you to do this. At least, I remember it being there in about 2001.

Additionally, the metadata on voting was particularly important for meta-moderation which other platforms don't really have. Users were (at random) shown a comment that you've voted on and your vote. They then said whether your vote was fair or not, based on what they see.

Stepping back a bit - the most important difference between the Slashdot system (vs something like Reddit) was that votes were much more limited on Slashdot. Not everyone had modpoints (votes) and you only got a handful at a time. This allowed meta-moderation to actually have some impact - if you continuously abused modpoints by downvoting someone as troll just because you disagreed with them then you wouldn't get banned - just you'd get less votes in the future. The system was a little opaque and I've not used the site in years but that was my understanding back then, it may have changed since then.

While it's a bit complex I think the fundamental idea is very good. Ok making a distinction between informative vs insightful never seemed that useful to me, but certainly allowing people to hide "Funny" content definitely has value because funny one liners tend to crowd out other content by sheer volume.

It's certainly very interesting to talk about, at least for me!

Starting with the results and working backwards, I didn't find the results of moderation+metamoderation on Slashdot to be superior to subsequent sites like Reddit and HN that skipped the metamoderation portion.

Why? I think metamoderation on Slashdot was ultimately redundant. The metamoderators were also the moderators. So your moderation was being moderated by the moderators that moderated the posts. The metamoderation was not really of a higher quality than the moderation, so it didn't really add much.

Metamoderation was good at flagging grossly incompetent moderation, such as somebody seeing an ASCII swastika and upvoting it. However, as long as the community as whole is relatively healthy, that sort of poor moderation would be rendered moot anyway; such a post on Reddit would receive perhaps 98% downvotes and 2% upvotes, it's not clear to me that preventing that tiny 2% minority from voting in the future would be demonstrably better than simply drowning them out which is what happens by default anyway.

Metamoderation could perhaps be useful if the metamoderators were guaranteed to be trusted, high-quality users.

Slashdot tried to do something like that; IIRC you got the opportunity to meta-mod after you were up-modded yourself, so theoretically "better" posters were doing the meta-modding, but in practice I think this just added an extra layer of echoes to the echo chamber.

You're right that the pool of moderators + meta-moderators was the same, but I think there's value in a kind of "peer review" for voting. On Reddit almost everyone (who expresses an opinion) complains that people use downvotes to disagree but I suspect that even the people complaining about it do the same thing from time to time (even if they rationalise it). Sometimes it's helpful for someone not involved in the argument to judge what you've done, even if that person is quite like you. It's pretty easy to imagine excluding anyone who replied to that same thread from meta moderating (or maybe doing something more sophisticated than that). It's not really about the trolls upvoting ASCII swastikas but the people regularly downvoting otherwise OK posts because they dislike someone's argument or their name or what they said in a completely different conversation. Or maybe it's about people upvoting low effort content (but for that to work, you would have different people metamoderating like you say).

It's hard to judge based on outcomes but I always felt Slashdot made you think about voting in a slightly different way. The system as it was there wouldn't work with Reddit for a variety of reasons but it's still useful to think about.

I think the majority of the enjoyable community moved on a long time ago.

For example, if you just mention you’re a happy Microsoft user, you’re accused (often in a racist way) of being a schill and the cause of everything wrong in the world.

As such you could get +20 flamebait, for a popular or welcome flamebait post,

or -10 funny, and so on - the tags where not inherently good or bad.

One of the most noticeable things is trying to skim a discussion with thousands of comments. On Slashdot, you can set your threshold to +5, and see only the very most insightful comments, no matter where they are in the thread. On HN, there's a lot more digging required to get the gems.

That said, I do think HN's "story-selection" algorithm is an improvement. What shows up on the front page relies a lot less on the quirks of the editors, and seems to result in a much more diverse set of posts.

As others have mentioned, I think the top-level moderation is the most important factor keeping HN worth reading. It's dang intervening and setting the tone which does the most for HN at the moment. We need to keep him happy; and I hope that he has a "succession" in place in case he's ever unable to continue the work.

Same with 9gag btw. It was funny, then funny with occasional eye roll and then "I dont have to look at this". I dont know whether it changed back or not.

This was removed because it was generating positive vote feedback loops (reinforcing both upvotes and downvotes).

I'm not suggesting simple technical fixes can be enough to remove the objections such as OP -- rather, that both a continuous oversight of technical stuff, and granular moderation, seem to be needed.

I agree that continuous oversight by quality moderators like dang are probably more important than technical tweaks.

As for the discussions, I make it a rule not to reply to comments—though sometimes, very rarely, I break it when I think I can truly contribute to the discussion. As for gathering the gist of the conversation, I usually read the three top comments to see what the most commonly agreed perspectives are, and the downvoted comments (with their replies, if any) to see what has caused dissent. It has worked for me so far in getting different perspectives of almost every article.

I've often shared genuine questions and thoughts before on HN with other accounts and always found myself getting absolutely karma destroyed. It was very discouraging, so now I just really don't bother engaging anymore. This was my same issue on Reddit. I (shamefully) admit I find myself even reading discussions on 4chan where there is no point system, but I see the problems with that: mass trolling

But still I ask myself why I see an increasing number of posts (at least a third) where I don't understand why they should be relevant for me as a hacker. There are platforms like reddit where you can debate about any topic out there, but HN should be more focussed.

I can't. There isn't always an answer. The author does provide a good list of what's wrong.

But still I ask myself why I see an increasing number of posts (at least a third) where I don't understand why they should be relevant for me as a hacker.

Online forums working is a very serious hackers' matter. What you're saying is just about that! There has been a lot of discussion about HN's algorithms to vote and select articles for front-page, moderation, etc.

It's worth remembering that a forum completely devoid of 'bad arguments' is realistically never going to happen. I guess (as the author notes) it's a matter of 'personal thresholds'.

HN has given me tons of hope for online communities, but every now and then, I run into what Yahoo article discussions looked like post 9/11(lots of whistling to the same tune, started by IC speakers). Don't go there, and you will not hear from me. These are my terms.

When a very talented & experienced person says, "that's a bad approach" with no explanation, you should pay close attention, but that type of comment gets downvoted into oblivion and on HN is explicitly against the rules. It's very artificial, that doesn't happen in real life. People who's reputation precedes them don't have to justify themselves. Guido Van Rossum is not going spend time laboriously correcting the things he disagrees with on open forums like this - he probably isn't browsing the forum in the first place. You have to adapt to that.

That becomes a cycle, and gradually the average quality declines as each successive tier of experience gets sick of it (and of being ignored when they try to articulate the problem) and leave.

Hacker News is not as vulnerable to this as other communities, and I'm not sure why, but it's still a problem.

The core issue is that external reputation is both hard to decipher on Reddit-style forums, and not rewarded when it exists. Every post is judged on its local merits, who posted it is usually irrelevant. Sounds good, but it just leads to people BSing. So HN is full of overwritten pedantry and BS, interspersed by the odd person with actual, hardcore experience getting sick of it and writing a lone, high-effort rebuttal. Which will tend to do well, but... It's not the typical post. Most posts are high-effort bullshit and resultant arguments.

Perhaps the broader issue here is that everyone loves to tell themselves they're leaving a community because they're too good for it, rather than just admitting that's it's become bad for their mental health to get involved in frequent anonymous arguments on the internet.

One side is convinced that a human life starts at the conception. And if you think that, it is very simple: Abortion is taking a human life, i.e., killing a person. Then nothing else matters. We can bring up all social, economic, feminist, psychological, health, etc. arguments in the world, all in vain. We all agree that we don't go around and kill people, so if you think that life starts at the conception, there's nothing more to argue about.

So in this case, we disagree only about meaning. The only way to have fruitful discussion would be to talk about what we mean by a human life. Then I'm not sure that is possible when one side's main argument is "the Bible says so". But there's nothing inconsistent or contradictory that could be resolved between the premises "a human life starts at conception" and "taking a human life is always wrong", and the conclusion "abortion is wrong".

Well, except for the police.

(Flippant comment, but the number of people who think abortion should be illegal under all circumstances but also that the police should never face any consequences for killing someone, no matter how gratuitously, is astonishing)