_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
DIR Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
b8 wrote 4 hours 3 min ago:
Welcome!! I was worried for a second that you were the Fallout Tom
Howard, lol.
yeahitsgreat12 wrote 10 hours 50 min ago:
How does such a large famous forum get by with 1 computer and 2 mods.
Theres no spam here. No fighting. How odd for the internet in 2025 XD
coldpie wrote 8 hours 58 min ago:
No images. No reposting. No (public) popularity contest stats. A
general vibe against politics posting. There's just not much here to
attract the worst kinds of behavior.
MrMcCall wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
[flagged]
coldpie wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
[flagged]
MrMcCall wrote 5 hours 11 min ago:
[flagged]
philipwhiuk wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
> He and Gackle have discussed diversifying their team, and adding a
third moderator who is non-white, non-male, and, Bell joked,
ânon-balding.â Gackle clarified: âWe've talked to each other
about that. But we wouldn't make it a requirement.â
Without any negativity on Tom, whom I'm sure is excellent, I suspect
you failed on this one @dang.
TheAceOfHearts wrote 11 hours 49 min ago:
Welcome tomhow. I really appreciate the HN community and the efforts
from the moderation team at helping to shape it into what it has
become.
hcmgr wrote 12 hours 32 min ago:
Congrats Tom. Fellow aussie HN lover here. Keep up the good work.
zerr wrote 12 hours 39 min ago:
Isn't HN self-moderating with upvote/downvote/flagging? I have an
impression that the notion of moderator comes from old forums (e.g.
phpBB) where they didn't have those features.
Arainach wrote 12 hours 35 min ago:
Votes are not moderation. Ignoring manipulation tactics, majority
consensus does not mean that something is right, acceptable, or in
line with site guidelines.
danwills wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
Thanks for taking on this role tomhow! It's seriously appreciated and
I'm also heaps happy that there's now someone in Oz that can moderate
while dang gets some no doubt much-needed sleep! Champions! Thanks for
making HN so bloody choice! Over of the best places on the 'net for
damned sure!
teruakohatu wrote 13 hours 28 min ago:
Congratulations Tom. Great to see the antipodes represented on the HN
team :)
DeathArrow wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
Welcome Tom and thank you for helping out this wonderful community.
Just out of curiosity, are you and dang payed for caring for this
forum? It seems to me it requires a lot of time and dedication.
tomhow wrote 7 min ago:
It is an actual job, yes :)
wglb wrote 2 hours 52 min ago:
Both are paid:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560796
GVRV wrote 14 hours 50 min ago:
Congratulations Tom!
Tom (and Fenn) had rockstar status back when I was involved in
university CS+Entrepreneurship clubs in Melbourne around 2009/2010
(mostly led by fine students at UniMelb, but I was helping spread the
word at Monash) because they were the first(maybe one of the first?)
Aussies to be accepted by YC. They always generously gave their time
and advice at these student events, even dropped by the SiliconBeach
networking meets to share their experiences and turned out to be
exceptionally kind human beings in person. Definitely the right choice
for moding this community!
Akhilmurali wrote 15 hours 9 min ago:
Congratulation Tom! :) Thank you for doing what you do here. Appreciate
it.
shrisukhani wrote 15 hours 10 min ago:
Welcome tomho!
wanderer42 wrote 16 hours 30 min ago:
Welcome Tom! And thanks Dang for tirelessly looking after the
community. HN is one of the last few sane places on the internet :)
keepamovin wrote 17 hours 3 min ago:
That's a great introduction and a great opening from Tom. HN gets a
second public moderator is a good sign. You would have to be crazy to
agree to this but I guess brave, too!
It's always a site that's had dinner party vibes even tho it's so big.
Weird! But the focus on curiosity and healthy is important.
I'm sure the features of HN are already extremely well thought out and
precisely balanced, but I guess this is as good a time as any to throw
out a feature idea: you know how you can favorite stories and comments?
I want to favorite users, too. Maybe privately. Because it's like a
bookmark thing where I can come back and see what interesting ones are
doing. Just makes sense to internalize it as a list rather than
externalize it into a browser bookmark list, I think. But then again,
maybe a private list or yet another list would be too much!
orliesaurus wrote 17 hours 57 min ago:
I immediately thought of the wrestler LMAO
MrMcCall wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
For the kayfabe?
BergAndCo wrote 18 hours 18 min ago:
[flagged]
dang wrote 16 hours 37 min ago:
You should supply links to whatever accounts you had that were
banned, so readers can make up their own minds about what happened
and how fair or unfair we were.
When someone makes claims about how they were unfairly treated, but
won't let people look at the actual situation, that's sort of a tell.
If the mods had actually treated them so badly, you can be sure that
it would be pointed to with neon hypertext.
BergAndCo wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
Here are a few shadowbanned users I saw in a /single/ thread (who
don't know they're shadowbanned as they prolifically comment away),
whose comments are pretty normie-tier: [1] [2] [3] (There seems to
be extreme bias or unfair flagging by users simply because "old
Texan" and "techright" are "scary Conservative-sounding usernames",
yet you pursue the innocents being reported rather than the
botfarms mass-flagging?)
It's all very "Everyone Stalin's sending to the gulags is a
criminal, though, so keep your nose down and mind your own
business." God sees everything, you know.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oldpersonintx
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tomohawk
URI [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=techright75
BergAndCo wrote 5 hours 11 min ago:
Right, so mods can claim it's my alt and ban me for ban evasion,
while the buttkissers comb her history for anything too
"techbro"-sounding to prove that she "had it coming". Not my first
rodeo, Danny boy.
jgord wrote 18 hours 5 min ago:
upvoted.. not because I agree, but because dissent has to be
tolerated in a civil society.
I would like to see more discussion on HN around topics that seem
unpopular here, and are perhaps politically divisive .. such as :
economic inequality, climate change, demographic crunch
Somewhere between the prevailing economic malaise, cynicism and
despair ... and tech-bro fan-boi greedy optimism : there might be a
middle way where we can use the new technologies of AI to actually
improve our lives and create wide wealth generation, and more
prosperity for the middle class.
BergAndCo wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
Thanks for replying; I had positive karma, now I have negative
karma and am lucky I'm not shadowbanned yet. Whether you agree with
the comments that got this user shadowbanned, do you agree with
shadowbanning this user for these comments? Because it was only for
these comments and nothing else.
MatthiasPortzel wrote 17 hours 54 min ago:
I am firm believer in the right to free speech and the importance
of expressing ideas that are contrary to the general cultural
attitude.
Thatâs why I turn on the Show Dead setting on HN, and I love that
HN has that feature.
Save your upvotes for people positively contributing.
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote 19 hours 23 min ago:
Thanks for the work you guys do, Dan and Tom, to keep this place a good
and intellectually stimulating place for discussion. We appreciate you.
haloboy777 wrote 19 hours 36 min ago:
Welcome tom!
I'm long time lurker on hn. Excited to see you as mod.
OuterVale wrote 20 hours 1 min ago:
This better not have any impacts on my capacity for mischief and
shenanigans...
Anywho, welcome tomhow.
pavel_lishin wrote 20 hours 12 min ago:
I thought he was just a character from Cryptonomicon.
mathfailure wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
While tomhow is of course welcome, I want to express gratitude to dang
for years of quite fair moderation. I've been around multiple
communities and he's nothing like those power-tripping libera.chat or
reddit moderators.
belter wrote 20 hours 53 min ago:
Welcome to the job Tom. :-)
Could you or Dang please explain, why this post with 118 points and 121
comments in 3 hours, about news of the day highly relevant to anybody
in Tech, only shows up on page 18? [1] Just trying to understand the
algo...
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253
wglb wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
You can see the front page for each day:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/front
deadbabe wrote 21 hours 6 min ago:
Thinking far ahead, is there some way we can train LLMs that will
moderate the same way as dang?
BrutalCoding wrote 21 hours 26 min ago:
Tom has now put Australia in the spotlights :P
WA here, hehe. Congrats!
ProAm wrote 21 hours 27 min ago:
I have to say HN is one of the best moderated online forums/sites on
the web. dang does a great job. Even when he disagrees with you and
moderates he is open to communication, clarification and adult
conversation. I really appreciate his work and have no doubt tomhow
will do the same.
I will post this every year on moderator day as a sign of respect for
this place.
URI [1]: http://cosmonautdreams.com/images/dang.jpg
broost3r wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
Congrats and welcome!
elorm wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
Welcome Tom, Thanks for all the hard work you've done in secret and in
advance for what you're about to do in open.
adamc wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
Thank you for what has to be a tough job.
sramsay wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
The question is, who among is willing to be the object of tomhow's
first official Unsportsmanlike Conduct penalty? ;)
taylorbuley wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
Thanks for being a crucial part of this crucial part of my life, Tom.
skeptrune wrote 22 hours 54 min ago:
Welcome welcome! It's crazy to think of how relatively long-lasting
HN's influence on startups and tech has already been.
NKosmatos wrote 23 hours 3 min ago:
Welcome Tom, all the best with your new role and thanks for being a
moderator along with Daniel :-)
Itâs good to see MGR (Moderator Geographic Redundancy) being
implemented on HN ;-)
Using RAID as an analogy, we now have RAID 1 moderators so letâs hope
to have RAID 6 soon :-P
Ok ok, enough with the silly tech jokes and the smileyâs.
vpribish wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
Welcome! can we call you tang?
the_arun wrote 23 hours 15 min ago:
Congrats Tom!
danbrooks wrote 23 hours 19 min ago:
Welcome Tom!
koolba wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
Would it be possible to give him a new username for this role like
âdarnâ?
Then we can continue confusing the beginnings of comments that appeal
to authority as interjections.
mindcrime wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
Yes, and then the next two mods could be "heck" and "gosh"! Maybe
"dadgummit" if the powers-that-be are feeling spicy. :-)
simonebrunozzi wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
Dang, and Tom: I think it would be useful for you two moderators to use
a "special" color, instead of the light gray that is used for any other
username.
metadat wrote 23 hours 16 min ago:
The best way to provide feedback is by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
I've received a reply to literelly every email I've ever sent (all
credit to Dang and Co for being extremely kind and consistent in
supporting my inner troll rehabilitation effort).
There is no site mechanism to alert moderators about @mentions, and
due to sheer volume of messages the site operators will typically
never get to see your well-intentioned message.
This thread does have better odds of being read than most, though :)
cheers
dang wrote 23 hours 20 min ago:
I've always resisted that, and I suppose it's fair to say pg did too.
It feels like an unnecessary barrier between us and others.
carstenhag wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
It does feel very natural on Reddit (where mods can enable a
flag/green user name when it's a mod response).
Rendello wrote 23 hours 3 min ago:
I agree, it helps make HN feel like a special place.
deckar01 wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
I believe the standard for annotating the utterance of deities is red
text.
johnisgood wrote 23 hours 16 min ago:
I propose it should be based on the specified accent color
("topcolor").
neom wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
Now that we have an Australian, suppose I'll have to change my tactic
of waiting for dang to go to bed before being naughty, how annoying.
Nice to see another helper. Dan, you are truly wonderful and I hope you
never leave us, however, I also hope this affords you some much
deserved "time off". Welcome Tom, and how.
bisRepetita wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
>I'm not going anywhere, so you'll have two of us to put up with going
forward :)
I thought that sctb was another one? No longer I guess?
dang wrote 23 hours 33 min ago:
Alas, not for a few years. He is greatly missed.
scrapcode wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
I've (mostly quietly) enjoyed the "vibe" of HN for well over a decade
now. It's certainly a major contribution to maintaining enjoyment in
the crazy world of tech. Thank you for your contributions to this
community which remains so special to an entire industry.
liamwire wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
Congrats mate, hope itâs a smooth transition into the limelight for
you
d-moon wrote 23 hours 51 min ago:
Welcome! Just do your best.
jonbaer wrote 23 hours 57 min ago:
Good luck Tom.
rmason wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome aboard Tom. Thanks to the efforts of dang HN has become an
incredible community. I've learned a lot on here and made some great
friends.
burnished wrote 1 day ago:
Nice! Thanks for the good work.
jgruber wrote 1 day ago:
Iâll bet this will fix HNâs transparency issues.
aberoham wrote 1 day ago:
May we please have another mod based within GMT to round out this
follow-the-sun pattern that's slowly rising
ofirtwo wrote 1 day ago:
Good luck tom in your new role!
jdjdjdjdjd wrote 1 day ago:
Any comments on this post regarding moderation at hacker news:
URI [1]: https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_is_...
MrMcCall wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
Power means being able to ignore the naysayers.
What does that comic strip say, "Everything's fine."?
Most people desire nothing more than to ignore their own faults,
unless they have the power to shut up their critics.
KolenCh wrote 1 day ago:
I thought it is an April fool joke about having Tom Holland as
moderator.
My bad.
palmotea wrote 1 day ago:
> He has been doing HN moderation work for years already and knows the
site and its practices inside-out, so the only new thing you'll see is
mod comments from Tom showing up in the threads the way mine do.
I wonder if there are any other secret moderators.
milesrout wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
There are many, I think? Dang has mentioned other moderators (plural)
before, I believe.
Raed667 wrote 23 hours 57 min ago:
If you reach 160'000 karma you can see the secret mods
saagarjha wrote 14 hours 22 min ago:
At 1 million you become a secret mod. Or so I hear.
Full_Clark wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
was really hoping the threshold is 65,535 because I'm much more
likely to reach it counting backwards.
diggan wrote 1 day ago:
If you flag, downvote, and/or vouch comments, you're basically
already a moderator-lite yourself :)
dragonwriter wrote 23 hours 59 min ago:
Upvoting posts has a moderation-like effect (opposed to that of
downvoting).
diggan wrote 20 hours 10 min ago:
I dunno, I feel like that'd be "curation" rather than
"moderation".
apocalyptic0n3 wrote 1 day ago:
We're all secret moderators except you.
Cthulhu_ wrote 11 hours 33 min ago:
I thought we were all bots?
apocalyptic0n3 wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
Both can be true.
hakaneskici wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
This would have been an epic April 1st joke :)
tux1968 wrote 1 day ago:
Hi, Same Tom Howard from osnews.com ??
genezeta wrote 1 day ago:
That's Thom Holwerda.
tux1968 wrote 1 day ago:
Well, that's an embarrassing mistake.
Thanks.
genezeta wrote 1 day ago:
Well, it is kind of similar. And for a split second you really
made me think it was him, so it's not that big a mistake :)
YeGoblynQueenne wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome and courage tomhow.
interestica wrote 1 day ago:
> He's still kind and thoughtful, but he's going to post as tomhow from
now on
I laughed at this phrasing. Welcome tomhow!
jedberg wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome Tom! Wishing you good luck from this former Reddit mod -- I
know how hard the job can be!
seatac76 wrote 1 day ago:
Warm welcome Tom! Hope itâs an easy gig.
MortyWaves wrote 1 day ago:
Whatâs the purpose of having a less clear username?
dang wrote 1 day ago:
It's about as clear as mine is. Weak binding between user handle and
real identity has always been part of internet forum cultureâat
least in the deep section of the pool that HN likes to swim in.
jimmyechan wrote 1 day ago:
Congrats Tom!
vessenes wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome Tom!
Thanks (in arrears and advance) for all the work here; this is the best
forum on the Internet, and we owe much of it to you guys.
tomhow wrote 1 day ago:
Many thanks for the warm welcome, everyone.
Itâs been a privilege to help support this community and to work
alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years.
Itâs a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving
community, and Iâm continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts
thought and energy into it.
One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was
expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process
the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the
bait and switch is onâ¦
wholinator2 wrote 8 hours 8 min ago:
Hi, I'm just some young guy but i wanted to thank you for
contributing to what makes this site great. It feels to me like this
is one of the last bastions of the true news aggregator/comment media
of old and i really appreciate everyone who dedicates time to
maintaining it. Thanks <3
skissane wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
> One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I
was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding
process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it
feels like the bait and switch is onâ¦
I would love it if you could get the current HN code base into a
state that it could be open sourced
I understand the desire to keep certain aspects âsecret sauceâ to
prevent abuse, but surely that could be addressed with some kind of
plugin mechanism and then just donât open source those plugins
gadders wrote 10 hours 4 min ago:
Please rewrite HN as an SPA using the most bleeding edge alpha
JavaScript frameworks you can find.
robertlagrant wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
The one thing that could improve HN is rendering fonts clientside
on to a full screen Canvas element. Then all we need is a
client-side framework for interpreting the element's pixels into
HTML for screen reader support.
diggan wrote 9 hours 28 min ago:
I dunno if you got the memo, but we're in 3rd of April now, no more
jokes allowed, especially not traumatic ones like those.
gadders wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
Reminder for April Fools Day next Year: Get Dang to do a post
saying HN is moving to a discord server.
residentraspber wrote 2 hours 45 min ago:
That's not a prank, it's just evil!
cantrecallmypwd wrote 11 hours 47 min ago:
All hail our new, most favourite overlord from the British
Commonwealth on days ending in "y"!
baobabKoodaa wrote 10 hours 49 min ago:
I, for one, welcome our new overlord Tom.
oseph wrote 15 hours 48 min ago:
Congrats Tom!
BUFU wrote 20 hours 36 min ago:
Welcome!
kragen wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
Best wishes! Please let me know if there's anything I can do to
help.
facile3232 wrote 21 hours 6 min ago:
Welcome! Good luck for a hard job.
insin wrote 22 hours 12 min ago:
Welcome, Tomho W
adamdennis wrote 22 hours 21 min ago:
Welcome Tom!
Rodeoclash wrote 22 hours 39 min ago:
Tom, what a small world. Seems just like yesterday we were at Inspire
9 together!
tomhow wrote 14 hours 12 min ago:
Hey Sam, we first met well before that :)
OzzyB wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
Thank you for taking up the mantle!
zormino wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
Thank you for doing what you do! I'm sure it isn't easy keeping this
place healthy and thriving, but me and so many others really
appreciate the blood, sweat and probably a few literal tears it takes
:)
jdthedisciple wrote 14 hours 21 min ago:
Not to forget â of course â the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that
must've went into cushioning the brain from the occasional
nervekiller comment, as well as the endo-/perilymph for the overall
"mental balance".
dmit wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
Welcome! And also I am so sorry
babuloseo wrote 23 hours 35 min ago:
Welcome tom, as a fellow moderator its not easy haha, I am sure its
easier than Reddit.
simonebrunozzi wrote 23 hours 38 min ago:
Welcome, Tom!
Thanks for your moderation work so far, and welcome as an official
moderator. Glad you'll be helping Dang keeping this an awesome
community.
QuantumGood wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
Thanks in advance, Tom. Never a better time for more smart work in
this area.
frainfreeze wrote 1 day ago:
One more welcome from another Tom o/
Nice to hear someone else is looking at Arc now as well! Any chance
we might see some issues on anarki resolved now? Perhaps [1] would be
a good starting point :grin:
Jokes aside, its good to see YC cares about community, and looking
forward to seeing your nick in the comments. Good luck
URI [1]: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/89
tombert wrote 20 hours 24 min ago:
Indeed, from yet another Tom, glad you're doing what you're doing.
HN is the best forum on the internet in no small part due to very
active moderation efforts.
picafrost wrote 1 day ago:
Great news and best of luck during this period of high tensions.
somelamer567 wrote 1 day ago:
As somebody who's seen communities come and go over the last couple of
decades, I cannot praise Hacker News highly enough. And we can thank
the moderators for that. HN is like an oasis for me: polite, sane, and
informative, and your values and principles really shine through,
especially below the fold.
Thanks for keeping the standards so high here!
sebringj wrote 1 day ago:
Congrats Tom. I wonder if a particular model could be used as a
baseline for these values or if they are already doing that to check
first level prior to a human in the loop? I myself have been using AI
for this purpose and have found it getting pretty good. I know its not
a replacement for thoughtful moderation however, a tailored model for
HN would also promote the tradition of HN in terms of having it not
just be about who is there and have it more trained on its best
practices to promote consistency, possibly as an aid.
codetrotter wrote 1 day ago:
In the classic tradition of thinking that âdangâ is pronounced
âdangâ and not âDan G.â I propose that we read âtomhowâ as
âTomh Owâ.
joenot443 wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
Has Dan ever commented on whether the "dang" pronunciation was
intentional? I too, was under the impression he just liked the
twanginess of the word.
I have people call me Joenot - in reality, this username was chosen
decades ago by my mother, pairing Joe (my name) and Not(tawa) - my
tiny hometown.
Sometimes I wish I'd chosen better but like many names, once it's out
there, it tends to stick.
alabastervlog wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
"To mhow"
Pronounced exactly as "to meow"
mkoubaa wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
Towhom it may concern,
I prefer the dyslexic pronunciation of towhom.
youainti wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
I think tom(a)how would work too.
gameshot911 wrote 1 day ago:
> dangâ is pronounced âdangâ and not âDan G.â
WAIT WHAT?!?
dang wrote 23 hours 13 min ago:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35463012
frainfreeze wrote 22 hours 10 min ago:
How comes your karma points halved?
ot wrote 21 hours 16 min ago:
Karma is stored in a 16 bit integer. It overflowed.
frainfreeze wrote 14 hours 26 min ago:
That's cool
pvg wrote 21 hours 59 min ago:
That is natural canadon decay. Think uranium slowly turning
into lead, that sort of thing.
foobarian wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
I too realized this only like a year ago.
wildzzz wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
I just assumed his name was actually "Dang" like he was Vietnamese
or something.
dang wrote 17 hours 4 min ago:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35463012
vpribish wrote 23 hours 6 min ago:
same. and when I learned it was Dan G I didn't accept it
entirely. now it's a sort of superposition of them - and mostly
a nebulous entity that maintains civil discourse - like something
from a Miyazaki movie
DistractionRect wrote 1 day ago:
If you torture it a bit, you can make it "tomorrow" said with a
weird accent. To mh ow
dylan604 wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
So, like if you were from Boston?
justsid wrote 23 hours 43 min ago:
That is exactly what my brain auto completed it into when I read
the headline
ksec wrote 1 day ago:
I want to say Welcome but Tom has been on HN for so long.
I want to say Congrats but moderating HN must have been a painful job.
So I guess enjoy, have fun and see you around. :)
mpaepper wrote 1 day ago:
Moin Tom,
Thanks for putting up with the work - let's go!
motohagiography wrote 1 day ago:
you (few?) do one of the biggest jobs on the internet. it's been a bit
of a vice, but sufficiently rarefied that it doesn't lower anyone for
indulging it. thank you.
it's said that perfect means lacking nothing essential to its whole.
I've often speculated about the mechanics behind it, but really, it's a
product that I think achieves today what apple and a lot of others
aspire to be, where it does something well enough that almost nobody
stops to question how. even if - or especially, when - that's probably
the most interesting question of all.
how do you replicate it? you can't. that's the point.
may the odds ever be in your favour!
hhcoder wrote 1 day ago:
nice to meet you tom
URI [1]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.profightd...
altairprime wrote 1 day ago:
Oh hey. Congrats, tomhow!
jedwhite wrote 1 day ago:
Congrats and welcome to the new public status! Forgive the
non-substantive comment but that's awesome :-)
eigenvalue wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome Tom! Thanks for helping to make this the highest
signal-to-noise ratio forum in the general technology/business space.
qwertox wrote 1 day ago:
Hi, I'm excited. I'm really wondering if you'll do such an excellent
job like dang is doing. This is a really special community, and now
it's in your hands as well.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
I always wondered how HN manages to do moderation 24/7 around the
clock. Australia makes sense.
raverbashing wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of it boils down on dang being oversubscribed. And having some
automations to help him
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
What do you mean by âoversubscribedâ?
Automation, sure. But people need to sleep sometime, and maybe also
have some life outside HN, for mental health. ;)
blackqueeriroh wrote 18 hours 31 min ago:
I think what comment OP is saying is that dang was working more
than was healthy - âoversubscribedâ meaning âsubscribed
above capacity,â i.e. âdoing yeomanâs work,â âdoing the
work of two people,â âthat man is like a machine,â âdo
you ever sleep, dude?â etc
nailer wrote 1 day ago:
Tom what was your company in YC W09? And how did it go?
tomhoward wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
This is what it became: [1] [2]
URI [1]: https://volantio.com
URI [2]: https://amadeus.com/en/airlines/products/volantio
URI [3]: https://amadeus.com/en/blog/articles/creating-a-private-resa...
bredren wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome, Tom and thank you Dang.
Teever wrote 1 day ago:
I think it's great to see more moderation from non-Americans.
My biggest critique of this site is that the user base and moderation
seems very biased with American perspectives to the detriment of the
non-American user base and the quality of content as a whole.
mkl wrote 1 day ago:
dang is Canadian.
zerr wrote 12 hours 43 min ago:
I.e. North American.
Teever wrote 22 hours 20 min ago:
I say this as a Canadian -- So he's basically Canadian-lite
culturally.
I want to see more moderation from people around the world, with
less geographic and cultural proximity to the Bay area.
Teever wrote 20 hours 8 min ago:
Oops, I meant American-Lite.
aemre wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome Tom, it is great that you came to Dang's aid because I was
starting to worry how much longer one person could do this great job
brilliantly alone.
edgineer wrote 1 day ago:
Great! Look forward to not noticing anything in particular changing
around here. Seriously appreciate this site.
EGreg wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome, Tom. Not easy shoes to fill! Moderation can be tricky.
nonrandomstring wrote 1 day ago:
I don't envy any referee who hopes to keep politics and technology in
separate corners and playing by Queensberry Rules. But good luck all
the same.
blatantly wrote 1 day ago:
When the technologists enter politics it is even harder!
chrisweekly wrote 1 day ago:
Right on! Thanks and good luck and please keep the ethos / vibe going
the way it improbably has for all these years. I've been active online
since about 1998, and HN remains unique in my experience. Kudos as
always to dang for the huge role he's played in that.
ddingus wrote 1 day ago:
Observation:
How lucky are we that our contributions here warrant two fine
moderators?
I just read Tom's brief story on how he arrived here and what it means
and felt... I don't really have a quick word for it.
I know I am better for having spent time here.
Oh, I got it! A tiny bit spoiled, but in the best of ways. Yeah, that
is what I felt.
How lucky we are indeed. :)
BergAndCo wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
Do you have showdead enabled to see how many good comments are being
unfairly censored? Otherwise this is just survivorship bias talking.
_Algernon_ wrote 8 hours 33 min ago:
I have had showdead enabled for years and I think I can count the
number of dead comments that didn't deserve the status on one hand.
ddingus wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
Same.
I turned it on very soon after I setup my account. My own
personal tolerance for speech is less aggressive than what we see
here on HN. I dislike completely inaccessible history, and basic
accountability is why.
Works like the trash does. Want to see how people live? Pick
through the trash.
gsf_emergency_2 wrote 13 hours 17 min ago:
I suspect that dang has been barely surviving the
(e-)moderation-technology debt (Arc notwithstanding). Good to have
a second, antipodal, guy take on the burden!
dang wrote 14 hours 22 min ago:
If you see a good comment in the [dead] state, you don't have to
complain about it being "unfairly censored" - you can intervene to
fix it by vouching for it. This is in the FAQ: [1] .
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
_Algernon_ wrote 8 hours 31 min ago:
That requires the user to reach the "small karma threshold".
Difficult when the user you replied to has negative karma after
several months of HN participation.
dang wrote 6 hours 54 min ago:
The threshold is 30 karma. Anyone can easily reach that if they
want to use HN as intended.
saagarjha wrote 14 hours 22 min ago:
Not many.
AlexeyBelov wrote 15 hours 10 min ago:
I have! It's very rare that I see a comment being flagged unfairly.
Sometimes it appears as unfair to me, but then I try to look from
other angles in case it's just my bias.
Also, don't forget that it's mainly other users who flag, not
moderators.
Also also, it's a bit ironic coming from a 3 months old account
with already negative karma. I believe HN has a problem with users
who create many new accounts and don't bother to understand "what
is a good thoughtful comment" and change their behaviour.
eddyg wrote 1 day ago:
Congrats Tom! And thanks Dan! (Yes, I've been around long enough to
know the "G" is for your last name! :)
saagarjha wrote 14 hours 20 min ago:
I feel like it's a little unfair when it's coming from "eddyg".
LinuxBender wrote 1 day ago:
Good luck Tom. I do not envy the people that take on the work required
to moderate this site while remaining unbiased and I am glad you are
ready for the challenge. I am sure you will do a fantastic job.
sctb wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome, Tom! Sometimes I can't believe how good we have it here. Thank
you both very much.
tomhow wrote 1 day ago:
Sincere thanks to you too, Scott.
jpm_sd wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome, Tom. Are you a Neal Stephenson fan? There's a memorable
character in Cryptonomicon who shares your name...
replwoacause wrote 1 day ago:
Are mods on HN paid or do they just do it for the love of the game?
internetter wrote 1 day ago:
Dang is paid:
URI [1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over...
dang wrote 1 day ago:
We're both paid.
hakaneskici wrote 1 day ago:
Congrats Tom!
Thanks dang and other mods for protecting this sacred corner of the web
for so long. You're the guardians of the best no-BS tech news
community. It is truly an under-appreciated effort.
Best wishes.
rurp wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome Tom! I want to add to the chorus saying how excellent HN has
been for so many years, in large part thanks to the excellent
moderation. I dove into forums early on and they have always been one
of the favorite and most treasured parts of the internet. It's not an
exaggeration to say that HN is one of the best ever. The longevity is
commendable, especially in an industry full of fads and flameouts.
Dang and Tom, please keep doing what you're doing.
joe_hills wrote 1 day ago:
Congrats, Tom! Iâm glad to hear thereâs more than one moderator
here so you can share the workload and hopefully relax well on your
time off.
catinblack wrote 1 day ago:
Congratulations!
kiddico wrote 1 day ago:
A: Welcome!
And B: Just curious, what was dang's old longname?
internetter wrote 1 day ago:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gruseom
tptacek wrote 1 day ago:
'gruseom
mondobe wrote 1 day ago:
I would guess some version of "Daniel Gackle", as seen at the very
bottom of
URI [1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/people.html
ChrisArchitect wrote 1 day ago:
Good Morning Oz! Congrats, you're on overnight duty
blatantly wrote 1 day ago:
G'day! 24/7 SRE coverage. Yay! R stands for respectability.
SCUSKU wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome! Excited to be under your wing Tom! Thank you Dan!
cbeach wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome Tom!
One thing I'd really like to see is less tactical flagging of content.
Hopefully with your additional help, people who suppress content they
disagree with will be kept in check.
Open discourse is something that used to be sacrasanct in scientific
and engineering circles. Over the last decade or so, free speech has
been on the decline, and discussion is now very polarised along
political lines.
For example, it's nearly impossible to discuss technical progress made
by Elon Musk's companies without brigading by leftwing commenters, and
I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly
flagged and squirreled away. This is self-serving behaviour by bad
actors and should be addressed in order that HN is a
politically-neutral forum for discussion, and not a leftwing echo
chamber.
Vaslo wrote 22 hours 27 min ago:
I will assist in reporting brigading leftist commenters. There are
many of us that want to see politics out of commentary when
unnecessary.
tomhow wrote 23 hours 56 min ago:
I understand, and lament, that the world is so polarised these days.
There's a limit to what we in this little corner of the web can do to
correct such powerful global macro trends, but we'll continue to try
our best.
If you see things that are unfairly flagged, you can email us and
we'll look at them. As long as comments/submissions are within the
guidelines, we'll restore them.
We want HN to be a place where people can discuss contentious topics.
This is a major reason why I've moved into an expanded role here. I
think HN has been, and can continue to be, one of the better places
on the internet for discussing contentious topics.
The thing to remember is the guiding principle of HN is curiosity.
This place is not meant to be for ideological battle, or for trying
to win arguments. It's for conversations where we can learn from each
other about things we're curious about.
I've always liked to learn about the opposing side of whatever
position I hold. That's why I've found HN to be so valuable, and I
want it to be a place people to come to for that reason for many
years into the future.
dredmorbius wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
How effective are vouches in this regard?
I'll do that reasonably frequently on both posts and comments,
though I'm not sure how effective that is.
One sec, let's look at the endpoint ... First page (30 entries) for
each shows, at this writing:
- 13 dead of 30 vouched, submissions.
- 26 dead of 30 vouched, comments.
The endpoints for the uninitiated:
Posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE
Comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE&kind=com
ment
I'll also admit that at times that's a protest vote against mod
interactions as well.
(The URLs are only visible to the owner of the UID, and I presume,
moderators as well.)
dmix wrote 1 day ago:
Some valid threads will get flagged because the comment section will
be extremely predictable flame wars and have nothing to do with the
article. That's the nature of social media. People can't help
themselves. There's plenty of other social media sites for that sort
of sports team drumbeating, so not much is lost by flagging some news
article off the frontpage.
kubb wrote 1 day ago:
I hope people don't get punished for flagging Musk appreciation
content. There's a lot that can be wrong with such submissions
(cultism, uncritical praise, excessive volume, lack of substance,
etc.).
cbeach wrote 12 hours 8 min ago:
> cultism, uncritical praise, excessive volume, lack of substance
All of which are subjective judgements on the content, which will
naturally be reflective of a voter's political biases
kubb wrote 6 hours 12 min ago:
You canât eliminate subjective judgement, but cultism isnât
electoral politics, itâs about loving and adoring the guru,
feeling great about how smart the guru is etc.
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
> I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly
flagged and squirreled away.
Huh, I always thought it was the other way around. Anything negative
about Musk also gets quickly flagged and buried. I guess we can agree
that Musk is currently a lightning rod, and brigades on both sides
are acting to hide (positive and negative) coverage of his actions.
mindcrime wrote 1 day ago:
Flags are issued by regular users like us though. What do you expect
a moderator to do, except maybe manually intervene to "un dead"
something if it seems like a case of overly biased flagging? That's
assuming mods have the ability to do that (I've always assumed that
they do).
cbeach wrote 1 day ago:
Flagging content should be a privilege that comes at a certain
level of trust, and the privilege should be revoked by moderators
for people that use flags to further an agenda.
Trust in forum users can be measured by various metrics - The
Discourse forum software is a good example of how to do this:
URI [1]: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse...
Etheryte wrote 1 day ago:
How do you know that people use flags to further an agenda? I for
one both downvote and flag pretty often, but it's largely because
I don't like the tone of the discourse, not because of some
overarching ploy.
philipkglass wrote 1 day ago:
People do get their flagging powers revoked for misuse. There was
a time when I went on an overly aggressive flagging spree and my
flags no longer had any effect. Months later I sent an email to
hn@ycombinator.com to pledge more judicious use of flagging and
to request the restoration of that power. I got it back then.
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
Since it's such a powerful action, it would be nice if flaggers
had to at least justify the flag. Is it breaking a site rule? Is
it spam? Is it not the original source? Does it actually violate
the rules, or are you just using "Flag" as a mega-downvote for
articles you don't personally like?
pvg wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, that's the 'receipts for everything' idea and if you
think it through, you'll realize it's at a minimum impractical
and more likely just an outright bad idea. Where are these
'reasons' going to go? Who is going to read them or act on
them? It sort of wants to stick it to those bad flaggers and
misinformed downvoters or whatever but think about it applied
to you. Do you not recoil at being asked by some random web app
to justify your actions? Like, we're ostensibly here for
conversation not to fill out TPS report cover sheets.
This is 'drink verification can' but for messageboards.
tptacek wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of HN mechanism makes more sense if you can accept the
idea that the goal is to promote good threads, and not, as so
many people believe, to promote one set of opinions over
another. Requiring justification for flags would immediately
crud up threads with meta-debates.
A hard thing for people to accept, something that I think is
an unstated part of the HN ethos but nevertheless real, is
that it's almost always better to have no thread at all than
a shitty one. Important topics will inevitably get an airing
in one thread or another.
dredmorbius wrote 22 hours 8 min ago:
I've taken to linking to moderator admonishments (mostly
dang, occasionally pg or sctb) where I think it might be
helpful, e.g.:
< [1] >
This is not for every flag, by a long shot, and occurs
(checking my history) perhaps a few times a month.
Note that the follow-up to the above link also earned
another dang cite. Few justifications are original...
The practice seems ... not too disruptive, and at least
modestly effective. It also gives me a track record of
who's turned up before.
Linking quips both keeps my own voice out of the
discussion, and mutes the impact on the page itself.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478913
pvg wrote 1 day ago:
Requiring justification for flags would immediately crud up
threads with meta-debates.
That is true and I used to say it but the receipts people
evade it with non-public receipts (which can maybe later
somehow be audited). So I'm switching to dunking on the
thing for its martinetism and pointless bureaucracy. It
feels more self-indulgently righteous to boot!
mschuster91 wrote 1 day ago:
Frankly, I'd also love to see this for downvotes.
YZF wrote 1 day ago:
Congrats!
ddingus wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks Tom your work is appreciated and I'm sure will be appreciated
going forward. There's a whole lot of us here who really value this
place, and the many fine minds who share time with us in it, and you're
a big part of that.
Schwobaland wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome Tom - great to see, that both of you and yc cares for this
important corner of the internet.
theoryofx wrote 1 day ago:
One thing that I appreciate about dang, and PG before him, is their
intellectual honesty and strong sense of ethics.
On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an
investment firm as promotion for their business.
But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has
been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition,
its been capable of unreasonable greatness and real authenticity.
At this point, HN is sort of the tail that wags the YC dog. There are a
great many seed funds but only one HN.
It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a
non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope
that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a
while longer.
Good luck and thanks!
frereubu wrote 1 day ago:
> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a
non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope
that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a
while longer.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it...
throw_m239339 wrote 1 day ago:
I was there since around 2015 and the evolution of that forum and its
population/opinion has been very interesting, to say to put it
mildly...
Remember when the biggest disagreements were about ORM & Frameworks?
I miss those days. I didnt even mind the discussion about the ethics
of Uber or Airbnb, but now, now it is different, & not for the
better.
Karrot_Kream wrote 22 hours 58 min ago:
I think HN has been gradually losing what makes it unique. The net
is filled with BOFH-style pro-FOSS tinfoil hat tech content and has
been since the early '90s. The joke among my college cohort about
Slashdot was that IT Helpdesk 1 will have strong opinions on how
MSFT execs were engaged in crazy conspiracies. You can find that
kind of content anywhere that tech people talk. HN's value
proposition for me has always been informed commentary; industry
insiders, academics, and practitioners weighing in based on their
domain expertise. Today's HN feels a lot more like a rumor mill for
random people interested in tech. Along with this shift has been a
widening of scope where we don't just talk about tech but also
general politics. In general, HN has been gradually trending to be
just another big tech subreddit.
These days HN reminds me a lot of Reddit r/programming in the early
2010s. To me this isn't a good thing because I used to come to HN
to specifically get informed commentary. But there's no way for a
site as big as HN to be dominated by informed content anymore
because there just aren't that many people working on interesting
tech in the world. So I do what most others do I suspect which is
talk with friends from my alma mater and old jobs in group chats
and share HN links and laugh at the unhinged, uninformed comments.
I do think at this point HN has changed its appeal. I feel that
people today are attracted to HN because of its raucous, rumor-mill
feel rather than informed commentary.
basisword wrote 1 day ago:
Been here since 2011 and reading for a few years longer than that.
I don't think the site has changed, more that the world has changed
(a lot). There isn't that general excitement around consumer tech
and programming that there was 15-20 years ago. We've gone from
talking about how we need to start teaching coding in schools to
how we shouldn't bother because AI will be doing it anyway.
The fun has been sucked out of it all. It wasn't all that long ago
that we were excited by simple but fun devices like the iPad Nano
and Flip camera. Now we all have phones that can shoot Hollywood
films, we can access all art every created on them, and we have
watches that can save our lives...and we've got a bit too used to
it.
On top of that around here we used to get excited about scrappy
startups raising funding and trying to change the world.
Unfortunately because a number of those companies went on to
dominate the world in negative ways, exploit users and hoard
wealth, people have become jaded and scrappy startups are less
exciting because we assume they'll eventually do something
loathsome 10 years from now.
I'd love more framework debates, excitement, and creativity - but
until the wider world is happy and positive again I'm not going to
hold my breath.
sanswork wrote 1 day ago:
So been here slightly longer and the only shift I can recall is a
shift away from business to tech.
Early days had a lot more discussion about the business side of
startups and vc. Then it started shifting more towards tech too the
point now where startup/business discussion is mostly limited to
Show/Ask posts.
Karrot_Kream wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
The loss of chatter around the soft skills around tech (so
business but also UI/UX design, design patterns, organizational
approaches (like holocracy), planning processes, etc) has made HN
a lot less interesting IMO. If I just wanted the usual tinfoil
hat FOSS BOFH content, then I can go literally anywhere else.
Reddit, Matrix, IRC, Telegram, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon,
they're all full of it.
Then there's the widening of scope to big social issues that's a
different matter altogether.
basisword wrote 22 hours 57 min ago:
Is this because many of the soft skills you mention were in
flux/being 'disrupted' 15 years ago and since then they've
become the accepted norm? I enjoyed that content too but feel
like it was a time where startups were changing the face of how
companies operated and now most businesses follow those models
and they're not yet ripe for change again.
Karrot_Kream wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
I honestly don't know. On the one hand you're right, we were
in a time when startups were doing things like experimenting
with holocracy. On the other hand, companies and cooperatives
are still today experimenting with more efficient, equitable
ways to get things done. I feel quite disappointed that so
much of the anger over inequality in this community gets
aimed at US or international politics rather than discussing
things like corporate or cooperative structures which is both
more grounded and more easy for many of us as practitioners
to action.
To me it feels more emotional catharsis than intellectual
discussion; getting mad at politics is getting mad at
something you can't control and so is more of a way to air
out your emotions. Getting mad at corporate structure or
envisioning a cooperative is something we can control and
requires more rigor to engage with.
basisword wrote 21 hours 42 min ago:
I guess we've had a massive change in terms of remote and
hybrid work practices in the past few years. Sadly even
those discussions become political or angry rather than
good discussions of the pros, cons, and alternatives.
Swenrekcah wrote 1 day ago:
The whole western world is different and not for the better since
2015.
Erosion of public trust since then is tremendous and regrettable so
it is not surprising that we miss the communities that once were.
djhn wrote 1 day ago:
I've been here since around that time and to be honest, I haven't
noticed much of a change for the worse. The world around us has
changed, political life may have gotten slightly more complex, but
the community feels just as friendly, curious and insightful.
mettamage wrote 1 day ago:
Yea same for me. Nothing much has changed here. I guess it used
to be a bit more technical? But just a bit (I miss the Dolphin
emulator status updates - they got me hooked on the technical
content posted on this site)
jdoliner wrote 1 day ago:
> On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an
investment firm as promotion for their business.
I think it's at least as plausible that this is part of the magic
that makes it good. HN is sufficiently "on the margin" that they
don't have to do things like placate advertisers with their
moderation policies. The mods like dang, tomhow and pg mostly care
about HN as users rather than owners.
> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a
non-profit and maintained long-term.
That sounds good in theory... in practice it might be the beginning
of the end. Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a
mission of its own. Although I'm actually not sure of the legal
status of HN right now, maybe it's already something like that.
Akronymus wrote 10 hours 17 min ago:
Over the years I've become quite jaded on non-profits personally.
As they tend to appeal to the people who want to pursue an ideology
rather than follow the goals of the non-profit. Which usually are
at odds.
graemep wrote 11 hours 7 min ago:
> I think it's at least as plausible that this is part of the magic
that makes it good. HN is sufficiently "on the margin" that they
don't have to do things like placate advertisers with their
moderation policies. The mods like dang, tomhow and pg mostly care
about HN as users rather than owners.
I agreed, and would say its stronger than that. Running HN well is
great for Y Combinators reputation, and its focused on a relevant
audience. I am sure that has to be very good for them.
> Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a mission
of its own.
Absolutely. It happens a lot.
bell-cot wrote 1 day ago:
Before even the "has a mission of its own" part, an independent
non-profit needs to pay its bills. I suspect that dang & Co.
aren't working for free. Similar for servers & internet
connections & etc.
And I'd bet that few people here want to see ads, or start paying
for their accounts.
foobarian wrote 23 hours 18 min ago:
It seems a lot like the Emperor Joseph II - Mozart situation or
countless others like it through history. You could ask Mozart
to start a nonprofit, find customers etc. but it sure is
convenient when there is a Joseph II around who appreciates the
arts.
sanswork wrote 1 day ago:
People here see ads regularly which is how hn pays the bills. YC
hiring posts and company launches are all paid ads in the sense
that being allowed to post them is why YC funds hn.
ZeWaka wrote 1 day ago:
I imagine 90% of users here would just block any ads anyways.
tomcam wrote 1 day ago:
I hope dang and tomhow get rich doing this job. I'd happily pay
for HN too.
roflyear wrote 1 day ago:
I really don't think that HN lets dissenting opinions thrive (well,
not anything that is truly controversial but not clearly hateful).
That may feel cozy but it's not a reflection of anything pure or
good, imo.
r00fus wrote 20 hours 35 min ago:
There are some shibboleths that you absolutely can't touch or
you'll be downvoted rigorously. But less than on other fora.
altairprime wrote 1 day ago:
HN does not welcome dissenting opinions in certain areas of tech
where the individual freedoms of techies come into conflict with
status quo social harms to non-techies; so, for example, you
wonât see many HN articles about the ethical dilemmas of working
at Palantir, how our industryâs libertarian foundations obstruct
labor organizing today, what advantages the âbrosâ receive in
return for their misogyny, and so on. HN is a light-touch
moderation site â as libertarian as possible, in keeping with our
roots â so I certainly donât hold the mods as responsible for
the communityâs defensiveness in that regard. In general, whether
tech or otherwise, itâs not possible for a community to welcome
uncomfortable dissent against its own underpinnings without a
heavier hand on the moderation wheel than is cultural acceptable
for HN and for our community. That doesnât mean that HN rejects
all dissent â certainly they may be other pillars of obstinance I
havenât personally identified and studied over the past fifteen
or twenty years participating here â but, yes, absolutely, HNâs
community has zero tolerance for certain dissent.
saagarjha wrote 14 hours 8 min ago:
You don't see those articles because they get flagged instantly
by users. You'll see plenty of comments on it though.
infecto wrote 1 day ago:
I think itâs a tough balance because you want discussion but
certain topics have diminishing returns.
jdoliner wrote 1 day ago:
My experience is that HN's Overton window is probably on average
15-20% larger than most forums. That's not uniform across all
topics though. So if you skew toward a particular set of topics it
may feel like a typical forum, or even in some ways more
constrained.
hbn wrote 1 day ago:
My issue is it seems like something has to only be a bit
controversial to be completely hidden from everyone. There was
the recent DF article about how Gruber thinks his articles are
being artificially shitlisted and I can't help but agree? I don't
necessarily think the mods have their fingers on the scale, but I
wouldn't be surprised if the algorithm works in a way where if
enough people flag something it gets automatically hidden, and
there's enough people who see DF and automatically flag it that
those blog posts get hidden every time.
dang wrote 1 day ago:
That site had 11 major frontpage threads in the last year,
which is a lot.
Every single one of them set off the flamewar detector. That's
extremely unusual. If it were one or two I'd call it random,
but 11 in a row, whatever the reason, is not random. We turned
off that software penalty on about half of those threads.
yorwba wrote 1 day ago:
In his article [1] he mentions several times that he is
aiming for "comment traction," treating articles with more
comments than upvotes as successful while complaining that
recently there haven't been as many comments.
It does make sense that DaringFireball would consider
starting a flamewar a job well done, but of course HN is
optimizing for the opposite.
URI [1]: https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacke...
dredmorbius wrote 21 hours 13 min ago:
HN's "flamewar detector" (I prefer "spiciness indicator")
is one of those tools I'd been highly skeptical of, and
still have significant issues with, but ... it does in fact
work much of the time. It's where it doesn't work that the
problems really manifest.
I'd come to that conclusion after scraping all "past" front
pages from 2006 through May-ish 2023 and doing a number of
analyses of that corpus. (I've commented on that a few
times here on HN and on the Fediverse.)
One of the absolute spiciest discussions ever was a pg post
about HN itself. Which suggests that when a topic of of
direct interest and familiarity, people will tend to hop on
it. There are also a great many flame-y threads, though
note that by virtue of making the front page, my sample
probably skews to less disastrous threads with the absolute
sh*tshows being well below the top-30 fold.
Among other weaknesses, spiciness doesn't distinguish
between pure troll/clickbait threads, and those on which
there's a significant and justified spread of opinion. As
such, the metric makes hard discussions even harder to
have, though mods can and do turn off the penalty on
request (often many hours after the discussion's started,
for obvious reasons, which is its own penalty). I do wish
that HN could have those discussions, and I've thought and
written (both on HN and in emails to mods) about what that
might entail. I'm coming to the long-delayed and somewhat
regrettable conclusion that it's not the right tool for
that particular job.
roflyear wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
Or - he's critical of SV and large tech companies?
dang wrote 18 hours 45 min ago:
HN is replete with criticism of these things.
pvg wrote 23 hours 3 min ago:
He's known as an advocate for and analyst of (sometimes
critically, often less so) one of the biggest, richest
technology companies in the world. That's his whole gig.
J_Shelby_J wrote 1 day ago:
I follow the HN subreddit and routinely see very active threads
that arenât in the feed.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
My feeling is it also depends on weekday vs. weekend, and on the
time of day (or night).
tracker1 wrote 1 day ago:
Strong disagree here... While there are definitely those that will
bury some opinions with downvotes, there are others that will
upvote. Conservative, Libertarian, Progressive, Liberal and even
outright Communist views get expressed in varying comments and
that's just political leanings.
I only really recognize this because I'll be actively
reading/replying sometimes and see comments go +/- 2-3 up or down
votes back and forth on the same comment. While you may be at say
-2, that's just the aggregate. I sometimes wish I could see the
total up/down votes just out of curiosity.
airstrike wrote 1 day ago:
On the one hand, I think it's a bit unfair that this comment is
currently downvoted as it's discussing moderation on a topic about
moderation, so very much on-topic in this particular submission.
On the other hand, I think it needs to be more specific in order to
be valuable feedback. Which dissenting opinions? Can you provide
specific examples of comments you think got unreasonably flagged?
There's been an uptick in political posts which are off-topic per
the guidelines, so an uptick in the absolute number of flagged
submissions would just mean the community is properly enforcing the
guidelines, which is good. However, as a consequence of that uptick
in political submissions and flagging, there's also an uptick in
the number of users complaining a post is unjustly flagged, because
they incorrectly conflate enforcing the guidelines with political
opinion, and that is not good.
I think a lot of users are tired of this back and forth, so my
guess is they are reading between the lines of what you said (since
you didn't provide specifics) and filling in the blank with what
_they_ think you mean about undeserved flagging, with the topic of
politics being top of mind at the moment. This shows that being
specific helps both by providing actionable feedback while also
increasing clarity, which is your responsibility as a communicator.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
My understanding is that flagging does not imply moderation. When
enough people flag a comment, it becomes dead automatically.
There is, separately, the case that a moderator âkillsâ an
unacceptable comment, but then it only appears as [dead] I
believe (unless it was also being flagged by people). Someone
correct me if this is wrong.
ttepasse wrote 1 day ago:
The value of "enough" is a moderation decision made by a human.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs not a decision made per individual submission or
comment, I think. Of course, the specific automated mechanism
exists because some human decided to implement it. My point
is, in the case of the flagging mechanism, itâs not the
moderators who are deciding based on the contents of the
submission or comment.
airstrike wrote 1 day ago:
Moderation by the community is still moderation.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Well, you can call it that, but there is not a singular will
or policy behind what is getting flagged, and the HN
âcommunityâ isnât homogeneous. HN users can also
âvouchâ to counteract flagging. It only takes a single
vouch to un-kill a comment.
iambateman wrote 1 day ago:
I'm like 80% sure this is trolling as a tee up for all the people
responding with "HECK YEA DISSENT IS HAPPENING." :D
perching_aix wrote 1 day ago:
Is that a moderation issue? Because to me that's more of a system /
culture issue.
You can't argue in people's stead. If most dissenting commentary is
hurtful, inciteful, manipulative, generally demagogue, etc., it's
going to get culled, and you get a situation where "dissent isn't
thriving".
Teever wrote 1 day ago:
Moderation drives culture and should in the very least offset the
worst tendencies of culture.
Otherwise, what exactly is moderation for?
perching_aix wrote 1 day ago:
Moderation does participate in the culture of course, but I
disagree that it would drive it necessarily. You can only do so
much by reminding people to align with the posting guidelines
and removing ill fitting posts and individuals.
Teever wrote 1 day ago:
This place would look like 4chan if it wasn't for the
moderation.
Moderation absolutely drives the culture, by setting a tone
that drives away certain users while attracting others.
In other words what ever issues a site has are inherently due
to moderation whether it be a choice on the part the
moderators or a lack of resources to moderate as they would
like to.
perching_aix wrote 23 hours 57 min ago:
I don't think we're actually disagreeing. Yes, moderation
is key, but ultimately people post the content. As you say,
it's a matter of attraction. But if the target group of
attraction is empty, there's no amount of moderation that
can help that.
megadata wrote 1 day ago:
I think the fact that you're being downvoted for your comment
proves your point.
megadata wrote 1 day ago:
And me pointing it out is also being downvoted.
dang wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, because the comments are offtopic and against the site
guidelines (see the bottom of [1] ).
"I the noble freethinker, standing bravely against the mob"
comments are boring and repetitive, and therefore always off
topic.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
roflyear wrote 17 hours 39 min ago:
It's exactly my point that it's impossible to be critical of
these guidelines on here, and I think that's a problem.
ziddoap wrote 1 day ago:
Probably because a single example at a single time point can't
really be extrapolated to the entire platform across all times.
The comment being downvoted proves nothing (as evidenced by the
fact it's now upvoted to the 2nd top comment!)
And this comment of yours I'm replying to will probably get
downvoted because it's a complaint about votes that contributes
literally nothing to the conversation (in fact, detracts from
it).
megadata wrote 20 hours 40 min ago:
> because it's a complaint about votes
It's not a complaint. I'm just pointing them out. Without
them I couldn't argue my case at all.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
There is a difference between downvoting and flagging, and
between flagging and moderating.
rectang wrote 1 day ago:
The effect is the same â the comment becomes unreadable.
megadata wrote 1 day ago:
I said nothing about that.
fossuser wrote 1 day ago:
Your comment being downvoted for suggesting dissenting opinions are
not treated well on HN kinda makes your point. I agree in general
and spend less time here because of it. HN is still not as bad as
many alternatives, but I wouldn't say it's great for ideologically
diverse views.
pvg wrote 1 day ago:
If you think your dissenting opinions should be popular, your
opinions probably aren't all that dissenting. This person's
dissenting meta-opinion is unpopular, it's still there and it's
still being discussed. Discomfort is inherent in dissent, it's
not people putting a lot of likes on your
NormanRockwellFourFreedomsPainting.gif.
fossuser wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
It's not that they need to be popular, it's that voting them
down leads them to be dropped off from view (and makes it less
likely dissenting views will be shared). Reddit is the extreme
case of this where anything outside the majority group
consensus is heresy to be voted down/hidden/banned.
Better sites don't do this and have in-good-faith discussion
despite disagreement.
pvg wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
Can you link some of these better discussions on better
sites?
Dissenting views are regularly highly visible, often as
replies to consensus views. Even better - well-argued
counter-narrative/counter-conventional wisdom views regularly
appear as top or highly ranked comments. That's because the
people making those arguments do what sensible people do when
making an unpopular argument - they put in the work to make
their case more persuasive. They don't sit around complaining
that the other kids don't listen to them, they care about
their issue enough to try to work with human nature rather
than hoping some magical technology will change human nature
for them.
otterley wrote 1 day ago:
Then you're not spending enough time reading the comments on
controversial stories. Disagreement is alive and well on HN.
xboxnolifes wrote 1 day ago:
I disagree. People will frequently say that downvoting is not for
disagreeing, but in every controversial thread dissenting
opinions are quickly downvoted and frequently flagged. Some
recover, but many die or end up pushed down into obscurity.
Mildly controversial opinions sometimes survive and get
discussion, but anything past that rarely get a reply and just
get downvoted and flagged into oblivion. This isn't exactly a
slight against HN, as this happens basically everywhere past a
tiny userbase community. But I don't think it's particularly
right to put HN on a pedestal for its ability to handle
controversy.
dang wrote 1 day ago:
Downvoting for disagreement has always been fine on HN. People
sometimes assume otherwise because they're implicitly porting
the rules from a larger site, but that's a mistake.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
Karrot_Kream wrote 22 hours 46 min ago:
It has but I'm not sure this works at the scale HN operates
at now. When the community was smaller, the band of opinion
was narrower, so the downvote worked better. Now that the
community is large I'm not sure if this scales well. Just a
thought I've had over the last few years.
boredhedgehog wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
Wouldn't that only be true if the vote thresholds are
absolute? If the impact of a vote is adjusted based on
voters present, it should scale.
otterley wrote 1 day ago:
There are over 1,200 comments on this controversial story
alone, with plenty of debate within: [1] What more evidence do
you need that spirited disagreement is alive and well here?
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43517833
dooglius wrote 1 day ago:
That seems like a pretty mild controversy to me. How many
people could even say whether their water has added fluoride?
otterley wrote 1 day ago:
What kind of evidence would satisfy you, then?
dooglius wrote 1 day ago:
I have `showdead` enabled. It should not be the case that
I find flagged posts that are good -- that are well
written, don't break rules, etc -- but are flagged
(presumably) due to expressing a dissenting view.
gus_massa wrote 19 hours 36 min ago:
You can vouch it, and if the comment is still [dead]
but it's really good you can send an email to dang and
tomhow hn@ycombinator.com Remember to include a link to
the comment, and use it sparsely because it's a manual
processes.
mh- wrote 16 hours 45 min ago:
Like the parent commenter, I frequently see high
quality posts via showdead. I vouch them, but I've
never seen one resurrected soon after. I rarely
remember to go back and check hours later, but by
then the thread has died down anyway.
gus_massa wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
It takes a few vouches to unkill a comment. (The
exact number is a mystery (I don't remember dang
telling the number ever) and it may change from
time to time (or not).)
For not-bad comments just vouch them, but for
very-good-I-will-not-be-able-to-sleep-until-it-is-u
nkilled comments vouch and send an email.
pvg wrote 1 day ago:
That âpresumablyâ is doing a lot of lifting and
would be better supported by some examples of such
posts.
dooglius wrote 20 hours 53 min ago:
That's fair from your perspective -- although the
parent's question is what would subjectively satisfy
me. I don't keep a log of such instances, and I don't
see a way to view my vouched posts, but it is
something I observe often enough.
pvg wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
Sure, but the reason that question is being raised
is so that we can decide for ourselves how good
your evidence is - both conceptually and
concretely. It certainly doesn't mean you have to
share it but it makes the discussion actually
meaningful.
Your vouched items should be visible to you at
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=do...
mh- wrote 16 hours 44 min ago:
Does that link only show vouched items of some
recency? The page is literally blank (minus
header and footer) for me, but it's probably been
a week or so since I vouched a comment.
edit: sorry, I missed the sibling comment to
this. I only ever come across dead comments, not
posts. So I needed to add &kind=comment to see
vouched comments.
dooglius wrote 18 hours 37 min ago:
Ah, I meant comments rather than posts (and I
think flagging posts has a different meaning
since one cannot downvote posts) but it looks
like comments are visible by adding
`&kind=comment`. Anyway, the most recent comment
I vouched is [1] which I think is a good example
of what I'm talking about.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=435...
Suppafly wrote 1 day ago:
> People will frequently say that downvoting is not for
disagreeing
Those people are wrong.
Sohcahtoa82 wrote 1 day ago:
Downvoting pushes peoples comments down and greys them out,
effectively silencing them. It creates echo chambers.
I reserve my downvotes for when arguments are made in bad
faith, rely on logical fallacies, or present know-false
information as an argument.
If someone presents an argument on something I disagree with,
but it's made in good faith and is well-structured, it
deserves an upvote, even if I still disagree afterwards.
otterley wrote 1 day ago:
Your very comment is now downvoted but not silenced. We all
see it, as we do every grey comment, as long as one works
their way down the comments page. Not every comment is
going to be agreed with and rise above the fold, and
thatâs ok.
MrMcCall wrote 22 hours 23 min ago:
So you understand how echo chambers are created and are
fine with it?
The problem is that there is no one with power here that
can come to the "little guy's" defence. There is no will
around here for that kind of support, because the only
people hired to wield such power are of like mind. DJT
doesn't hire democrats, and this is no different.
Look at this comment section, and tell me this isn't an
echo chamber.
otterley wrote 21 hours 39 min ago:
I donât understand what your response has to do with
what I said. Differing opinions are welcome
hereâparticularly if they are eloquently expressed
and factually supportedâbut that doesnât mean they
will be popular. Thatâs just life. Opinions, like
most things, follow a normal distribution.
MrMcCall wrote 14 hours 40 min ago:
> Not every comment is going to be agreed with and
rise above the fold, and thatâs ok.
> That's just life.
Life is the result of what we choose, alone and in
our groups, and groupthink creates a momentum that is
hard to understand from within the group.
Only compassion gives us a clear and accurate
perspective on life, my friend.
And that's a fact, and its not being a factor in this
site's m.o. is precisely why it is the way it is, why
it is staffed by whom it's staffed by, and why its
founder has the Twitter profile picture he does and
why he rails against DEI.
It's also why your opinions are so valued here, and
why you don't understand what I said.
Perhaps you won't be so privleged some day and then
you will begin to really understand what life is
really about.
Without such a gift from life, you will most likely
just continue to think you understand, while asking
far fewer questions than you should.
What role does compassion play in your life? That is
the most genius question you can ever ask yourself,
and is really the only one worth either asking or
answering.
That fact is never accepted as truth by those who
already "know it all". Such is the way of "facts".
Unless your knowledge base is founded upon
compassion, nothing truly eloquent will be perceived
as such. Such is human life, my friend. All the rest
is just mammalian, when it comes to human beings in
their groups.
Is your group founded on compassion? That you don't
value it does not mean it is not the most valuable
concept in the universe.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
infecto wrote 1 day ago:
I would also argue that shutting certain posts down early is
what helps it thrive. Maybe you lose some value of topic but
you gain the ability to discuss other things in depth. You also
prevent pollution of discourse.
lordfrito wrote 1 day ago:
>> Disagreement is alive and well on HN.
> I disagree.
Head explodes
xboxnolifes wrote 1 day ago:
I had a whole paragraph that I removed that was to preempt
this reply, but I thought it wasn't needed.
incoming1211 wrote 1 day ago:
The problem is HN is mainly left leaning so its difficult to have
discussion at times as dang and the community will shut it down
quickly as differing opinions are not welcome even if its factual.
(chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS
nOt TrUe")
(Love how HN proved my comment as correct)
dang wrote 1 day ago:
> (chances are people will downvote without comment or scream
"ThAtS nOt TrUe")
> (Love how HN proved my comment as correct)
Please don't do this here. It's against the site guidelines (see
the bottom: [1] ), which guarantees downvotes, and then the
combination of help-help-I'm-being-repressed and I-told-you-so is
annoying to pretty much everyone.
As for "left leaning", see [2] (Feb 2021). The specific examples
are old now but there is an endless fresh supply from each tap.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870
Tadpole9181 wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, as someone who has criticized the mod team, saying you
are biased is just laughable. You go out of your way to be as
unbiased and user-oriented as possible. My biggest criticism is
procedural, Dan and friends are doing good work.
hnpolicestate wrote 1 day ago:
It's not left leaning, it's establishment leaning. But that's
only regarding politics and social issues.
lolinder wrote 1 day ago:
> HN is mainly left leaning
This is largely an illusion, as can be seen by the number of
people complaining in the other direction about how wacko
libertarians or MAGA or whatever dominate on here.
What you're actually observing is that HN is one of the more
diverse public spaces you participate in and there's no
personalized algorithm that filters the content to only show what
you want. When your exposure to left-leaning content goes from
<10% on an algorithmic feed to ~50% on HN, it feels like being
overrun.
Just know that it feels just as overwhelming to the left-leaning
people on here, and they will jump to the same interpretation in
the opposite direction.
wordofx wrote 1 day ago:
If 2 people end up in a civilised debate. Itâs not uncommon
for people to flag and downvote the opinion they disagree with
even if the opinion is valid or backed up with facts. Feelings
get too hurt here.
Tadpole9181 wrote 1 day ago:
That's why you have to earn down vote and flagging privileges
here. It's still abused, I agree.
roflyear wrote 1 day ago:
Sure but I'm not even talking politics! My comment itself was
barely a criticism of HN and, yeah, downvotes don't matter - but
it's exactly what I am talking about. Any push against that
coziness/bubble is not tolerated.
I do think it's OK for some forums - if the community agrees - to
say certain topics (like politics) are off limits.
I don't really think it's ok for a community to say discussion
about what should be discussed is off limits... or being critical
of policies, the bubble, etc...
hackyhacky wrote 1 day ago:
> My comment itself was barely a criticism of HN
Your comment is (a) off-topic and (b) smacks of a complaint
about not getting enough up-votes. Neither of these areas are
looked upon positively in HN. If this style of comment is your
modus operandi, it may explain why your work is not
well-received, and in short it has nothing to do with the
popularity of your opinions.
roflyear wrote 17 hours 32 min ago:
With respect, those are two strawmen.
hackyhacky wrote 17 hours 4 min ago:
No, I am just describing your comment:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43559544
roflyear wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
It's not off topic, as it's discussing moderation and the
culture of the forum in a post about moderation &
replying to someone discussing the culture, and I said
nothing about upvotes. It is two strawmen without
discussing any of the substance of my comments.
jszymborski wrote 1 day ago:
Little ironic considering you're the second comment everyone sees
on this thread at the moment.
Etheryte wrote 1 day ago:
A sample size of one doesn't really tell you anything in this
context. HN definitely has a pretty heavy bias in some
directions, it's mostly that the crowd that naturally flocks here
tends to mostly agree on those topics, so you don't see conflict
too often.
jszymborski wrote 1 day ago:
I feel like I often get into protracted discussions here in
which I am defending a minority view, but I don't feel
discouraged from doing so.
A huge part of that is that the tone is almost always civil and
the arguments are typically in good faith.
roflyear wrote 1 day ago:
Well, let's see how that plays out first, I did just post it a
few minutes ago (refresh has me at 0 karma fyi)
Lerc wrote 1 day ago:
It is a shame that people will downvote a thing that is
expressing an honest opinion.
I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use
downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.
I don't think this extends to the way that HN is moderated or
run. It is worth looking at dang's posts every now and again
to take in the job that he does and how patient he can be, even
with antagonism aimed directly at HN or himself personally.
From time to time I also have a look at the histories of some
of those antagonistic people. Frequently there are signs that
their behaviour was not always like this. Recent posts might
be outright abusive and sound like the postings of angry
teenagers. A few years earlier they might have been posting
reasonable discussions on their thesis topic or tutorials on
some useful subjects. Keeping that in mind helps you realise
that these are real people and there may be other things going
on in their life.
I think there are some good things to learn from people who
work with addicts. You can simultaneously challenge bad
behaviour and be compassionate to the person who committed it.
Similarly, this is why I'm not a fan of cancelling people or
holding them forever accountable for past bad behaviour. If
they recognise that their behaviour was bad and are
endeavouring to not be that way again, I don't think permanent
ostracism benefits anyone. If anything it restricts people to
a community that amplifies their negative behaviour.
wglb wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
> I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use
downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.
Downvoting is a legitimate expression of disagreement
according to PG.
roflyear wrote 17 hours 34 min ago:
He's probably wrong about it. Imagine if you could do that
in real life.
pvg wrote 1 day ago:
I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use
downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.
That's a valid use of the button by design, HN is literally
made to allow for that use. Plus it mimics real life
interactions - there is a social cost/friction to saying
things people disagree with or think are outright wrong. Most
online chitchat places deteriorate because they remove such
social frictions.
Lerc wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
I would say it mimics real life interactions of some
communities. I do not think that is universal. I tend
to think that the communities, in real life and online,
that permit civil discussion of dissenting opinions are the
healthier ones.
I think there is a far greater real life social cost in
violating standards of behaviour, such as aggressive
engagement, or acting without empathy. I would argue that
it is those influences that can be lacking in online
discussions that cause them to deteriorate. There is also
a lower barrier of entry for joining an online community
than joining a real life community. A few dedicated but
detrimental people can always evade safeguards and pollute
a community to some degree, online communities being
larger provide the possibility to each individual to do
more damage, while also increasing the chances of there
being individuals that would do so.
pvg wrote 22 hours 31 min ago:
I would say it mimics real life interactions of some
communities. I do not think that is universal.
I would say this is straight up wrong. It is universal
since it's fundamental to being a social animal. There's
a cost to being at odds with a group. We do have all
sorts of mechanism and rituals, formal and informal, to
minimize or amortize that cost in all sorts of settings
but it's still there and it's still essential. You look
at the faces of your coworkers in a meeting in which
you're making some unpopular proposal to see how it's
going over and you feel the slight sting of recognizing
the smallest hints of disapproval. It's built right into
all human interaction.
Lerc wrote 20 hours 17 min ago:
I guess we shall have to agree to disagree there.
pstuart wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure about that, but a lot of it depends on what you
consider to be "dissenting opinions".
kccqzy wrote 1 day ago:
For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for
users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.
Personally I hope Tom will bring new moderation policies that
will truly let unpopular opinions thrive, but I don't have high
hopes here since this is just an announcement of a new moderator,
not an announcement of new moderation policies.
maccard wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm a fairly steadfast holder of the âI like apples walled
garden, itâs my choice to be thereâ argument, and I think
as a dissenting opinion on this forum I get a lot of flak for
it. But thatâs not a moderation problem, itâs the fact that
my opinion is different and I have 10x the number of people
disagreeing with me than agreeing with me.
stuartjohnson12 wrote 23 hours 33 min ago:
Upvoted, but your opinion is wrong and I didn't want to leave
without telling you I hate your opinion.
buttercraft wrote 1 day ago:
> having the opinion
What I see a lot of is this:
User posts "$opinion $generalization $snark $dismissal
$adhominem".
User gets down voted or flagged. User complains that downvotes
are for expressing $opinion and that $opinion is not allowed on
this site!
But we can all see the other things in their post that probably
brought on most of the downvotes.
ziddoap wrote 1 day ago:
I agree. "It's not what you said, it's how you said it.".
Most stuff I downvote is because of the way it's expressed,
not because of the opinion itself.
JoshTriplett wrote 1 day ago:
> For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for
users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.
That's not a moderation issue. You can post that opinion, and
people will disagree with it, post responses to it, and
downvote it. It will not be flagged out of existence, unless
it's also violating site policy in other ways.
tptacek wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
As someone who actively believes Manifest V3 is good for
users, I second this: my opinion is not suppressed by this
forum. It's simply unpopular among nerds, the population to
whom this forum is aimed.
nailer wrote 1 day ago:
A polite well worded post that disagrees with the mainstream
will indeed still exist, but it will be moderated to
unreadably transparent and hidden by default. Itâs not a
great experience.
Meanwhile personal attacks and hyperbole regarding Elon Musk
and Trump have become very common on HN.
JoshTriplett wrote 1 day ago:
> A polite well worded post that disagrees with the
mainstream will indeed still exist, but it will be
moderated to unreadably transparent and hidden by default.
Itâs not a great experience.
Speaking from personal experience only: I have mostly not
observed "polite, well-worded posts disagreeing with the
mainstream" get downvoted to oblivion, unless some other
factor also applies, such as that they're also things that
seem likely to lead to a rehashed old-as-the-hills
disagreement with no new information that will not on
balance change any minds.
If you post (by way of example only, please observe the
use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads are
good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive pile
of downvotes, I think that's a reasonable signal that the
community isn't interested in seeing iteration 47,902 of
that argument, and has no expectation that anything new
will come out of that argument. If you have something new
to say on that topic that is likely to lead into new and
interesting arguments, at this point you would need to
signpost that heavily, prefacing it with some equivalent of
"Please note that I'm aware this is an age-old argument,
but I think I have a new point to make that is worth
considering", and then actually make a new point, at which
point I think you're less likely to get downvoted to
oblivion.
Personally, I don't downvote "mere" disagreement. I
downvote (among other things) what seems to me to be
uninteresting or thoughtless or insufficiently diligent
disagreement, or factually incorrect information, or
anything that seems like a discussion that spawned from it
will not be interesting.
Now, that said, another factor here is that some people
posting on political topics in particular believe they're
making "polite well-worded posts disagreeing with the
mainstream", and others do not share that belief and flag
it to oblivion. For example, posts expressing bigotry
mostly get flagged, no matter how surface-level "polite"
they are.
nailer wrote 1 day ago:
> If you post (by way of example only, please observe the
use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads
are good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive
pile of downvotes...
Sure, I imagine the grandparent poster means arguing
something like "limiting access for extensons is good
because they're often used to steal financial assets".
Old extensions are sold, or cracked and updated to inclue
malware.
JoshTriplett wrote 21 hours 9 min ago:
I want to avoid letting a meta-level conversation slip
into object-level. But using the object-level as an
example, I would expect a comment that acknowledges the
types of things that are hard to build with Manifest
V3, particularly more advanced adblocking, and
acknowledges that there need to be solutions for those
things, and makes the point that letting extensions be
all-powerful does lead to problems and that also needs
solving, would not get downvoted to oblivion. That's
much more nuanced than, for instance, suggesting that
Manifest V3 is an unalloyed good with zero problems,
which I would expect to get downvoted.
nailer wrote 9 hours 18 min ago:
> acknowledges that there need to be solutions for
those things
Why is this required, in order not for the comment to
be downvoted to oblivion? You may be confusing bias
with nuance.
JoshTriplett wrote 9 hours 4 min ago:
I'm giving an example, which to some degree was
meant as an existence proof of a way to support an
unpopular position without getting massive
downvotes. "X is entirely good with no problems
whatsoever" being replaced by "I think the benefits
of X outweigh the costs, and here's some
acknowledgement of the costs". I'm not trying to
suggest only one possible way to do that, or only
one pattern to follow. (This is one danger of using
an object-level example.)
nailer wrote 7 hours 57 min ago:
OK. Yes I agree thereâs a cost to anything and
acknowledging that is important.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Downvoting and flagging is not moderation.
JoshTriplett wrote 1 day ago:
Flagging does seem to primarily be a tool for moderation.
But for comments, at least, I've mostly not observed
flagging being used to hide things that shouldn't be; if
anything, I think flagging is underused on comments.
(It's still regularly abused on stories as a downvote,
perhaps in part because stories don't have downvotes. HN
sometimes "rescues" stories that get over-flagged, but
it's still a problem.)
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Flagging isnât done by moderators, itâs done by
regular HN users.
JoshTriplett wrote 1 day ago:
I didn't say it was done by moderators, I said it was
a tool for moderation. Flagging is the means by which
regular HN users perform moderation activities, in
addition to the actions available to the moderators.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Ok, I see. I understood âmoderation policiesâ
upthread to refer to what guides the actions of the
moderators.
JoshTriplett wrote 1 day ago:
Fair enough, I can see from the thread how that
interpretation could arise. I would definitely
interpret "moderation policy" to be policy
implemented by moderators. In this case, I was
responding to the statement that "flagging is not
moderation", and I thought it was useful to
distinguish that flagging semantically is a kind
of moderation (done by users rather than by
moderators).
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
For me the difference is that moderation by
moderators is (usually) guided by some content
policy, and one can disagree about the biases
of the specific content policy, or disagree
about applying a content policy based on topics
and themes at all (as opposed to based on mere
style and civility). With user actions, there
is no predefined content policy, itâs just
how the set of users who happen to read the
specific thread or comment happen to feel.
Personally, Iâd prefer no up-/downvoting and
flagging at all (or flagging only to alert
moderators), and purely chronological
threading. But I also think that active
moderation and crowd-sourced ranking mechanics
are two different things.
JoshTriplett wrote 1 day ago:
> Personally, Iâd prefer no up-/downvoting
and flagging at all (or flagging only to
alert moderators), and purely chronological
threading.
I think that's a very different kind of
forum, and it needs different tools to be
usable, and it more quickly fails into
unusability.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs how old-style forums work, and Iâm
still on a couple of them. It functions
quite well with the right moderation.
JoshTriplett wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
It can work, but I think it's harder to
scale to something the size of HN without
losing some of the important properties
HN has.
For example, I think it's useful that on
balance the top few comments and their
discussion are likely to be interesting,
and the last few comments are unlikely to
be interesting.
hackyhacky wrote 1 day ago:
> For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for
users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.
There is a difference between expressing unpopular opinions
(e.g. "manifest V3 is good"), which receive an appropriate
level of considered disagreement; and expressing opinions that
are removed administratively.
In my experience, the former is quite common, while the latter
only occurs in cases of hateful or off-topic comments. That is
as it should be. No one is obligated to agree with you, and
that fact should not dissuade you from expressing yourself.
otterley wrote 1 day ago:
"Not thriv[ing]" is not the same as being quashed. Minority
opinions don't always rise to the popularity or acceptance
level of majority opinions, and that's OK.
kccqzy wrote 1 day ago:
Let us not use the word "thrive" or "quash" to avoid
misunderstandings. To rephrase, I hope that on HN even
minority opinions have reasonable rebuttals. Unfortunately
what currently happens is people flag minority opinions with
no discussion.
JoshTriplett wrote 1 day ago:
"flag" and "downvote" are two different tools with two
different purposes.
"downvote" seems more appropriate for for "this is not
interesting and should be less prominent".
"flag" seems more appropriate for "this should not be here
at all".
By way of an example, on a political story, if you say
something merely unpopular, you'll get downvotes and
replies; if you say something hateful, you'll (usually) get
flagged.
kccqzy wrote 1 day ago:
I agree with you, but that's not what happens for
polarizing topics that are technical in nature and not
political. People on HN seem to flag comments rather than
downvote them.
otterley wrote 1 day ago:
I agree that that's not a best practice. It's not what the
downvote mechanism was intended for.
MrMcCall wrote 22 hours 14 min ago:
Flagging is used by people who have no rebuttal but are
mad.
That's why I have only flagged one or two posts, ever,
but not because I was mad, but because the comment was
just plain beyond the pale.
And my posts against portaying violent rape in film got
flagged.
Make it make sense, because I understand the failure of
this system because systems are my trade-in-craft.
AlexeyBelov wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
> Flagging is used by people who have no rebuttal but
are mad
This is cope, just like "I'm being downvoted for
speaking the truth!". Nobody thinks "wow, they said a
true statement, I should downvote them".
I suggest you try to steelman the idea of flagging and
see that maybe there could be other things at play.
MrMcCall wrote 14 hours 25 min ago:
> Nobody thinks "wow, they said a true statement, I
should downvote them".
Precisely. That's the biggest problem with
closed-minded fools.
jraph wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
Nope, sometimes I would have a rebuttal but flagging is
the better option (constructive discussion is hard
without mutual respect, and/or don't feed the troll).
Or, the comment doesn't even have anything to refute,
it's just disrespectful or it's spam, or both.
I have flagged a few comments but I'm rarely mad.
And if one is mad because of a disrespectful comment,
the flagging is probably appropriate too.
MrMcCall wrote 15 hours 27 min ago:
> constructive discussion is hard without mutual
respect
Yes, indeed.
tracker1 wrote 1 day ago:
In a way, iirc, it really is. It's as much a "I
disagree" as it is "I don't like this". That said, I
would like to see more people actually respond in
addition to a downvote.
I don't think that's generally a function of the
moderators though.
roflyear wrote 1 day ago:
I agree it depends on the definition. Quite honestly my vibe, and
really that is all it is for any of us discussing this, is pretty
much anything more aggressive than my comment above (or even
including my comment above, once more people read it).
I definitely DO NOT mean clear hate speech, etc.. that's not my
point at all.
mac-mc wrote 1 day ago:
So, do you mean you don't like tone policing? You can say
pretty much anything as long as the tone stays intellectual and
doesn't go into brain damage politics, harassment, or
conspiracy zone where it's being banned because it's off-topic
and, frankly, exhausting and unproductive.
roflyear wrote 17 hours 41 min ago:
No, and if you read the tone of my posts and even the tone of
dang (and others) here I would argue that my tone is not out
of line and arguably more polite.
But I'm the one that is rate limited in this thread and
prevented from interacting with people politely.
alwa wrote 1 day ago:
I, for one, come here in substantial part for the norms against
aggression and toward calm substantive discussion.
Shouting matches and rhetorical posturing are exhausting. There
are places for thatâmost places online, anymore; this is not
one of them.
dskhatri wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome Tom! I have been visiting this site (almost) daily for 17.5
years now thanks to the wonderful technical community and diligent
behind-the-scenes moderation.
coldfoundry wrote 1 day ago:
Congrats! Keep on making HN what it is!
duxup wrote 1 day ago:
>He's still kind and thoughtful
Me thinks the OP is really trying to dive this point home for some
reason ...
/s
dang wrote 1 day ago:
I was just trying to be funny but it's a point I'm happy to drive!
clgeoio wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome!
raphman wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome, Tom! Y'all are making HN a place that I still love to visit
every day. I find it awesome how dang et al. not only manage to keep
spammers and trolls in check but also actively improve discussions by
merging threads and asking people to behave.
zachwill wrote 1 day ago:
Congrats, Tom!
isoprophlex wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome, and thanks for striving to keep hn the bastion of intellectual
curiosity that it's been in the ~9 years since I joined. I get
tremendous value out of this website, and I'm very grateful for the
effort you all are putting in to keep it stable.
abnercoimbre wrote 1 day ago:
Unsung heroes deserve praise. Cheers mate.
giancarlostoro wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome Tom, thank you and Dan for helping to run one of the best
corners of the web for many of us.
Curious that you both made new accounts, is that basically a similar
thing to having a "root" user then? So you can't use a normal /
previous account or it will ruin it? :)
dang wrote 1 day ago:
No, it's just a device to mark the context switch and to avoid
misunderstandings, since the previous comments were all posted
without an implicit "mod" bit.
giancarlostoro wrote 1 day ago:
Ah that makes sense! Thanks for the clarification. It's always
interesting learning how HN operates.
EcommerceFlow wrote 1 day ago:
Tom, please fix the flag abuse problem. It's gotten to the point where
I realize there's no point in commenting on many threads, given my
opinions, some of which are very normal nationally.
bee_rider wrote 1 day ago:
A political talking point can be nationally popular but still
political, so, outside the scope of the site.
Anyway, which nation? I think we also arenât allowed to push
Communist party talking points here, despite that party being highly
supported in some countries (not that Iâd want to, just saying,
nationally popular doesnât mean much).
eddyg wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of people don't read the Hacker News Guidelinesâ½Â¹â¾
before submitting and deserve to be flagged. Quoting (emphasis
mine):
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or
celebrities, 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.
â½Â¹â¾
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
timeon wrote 1 day ago:
> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon
Maybe time will tell if it was actually OT.
ziddoap wrote 1 day ago:
>Maybe time will tell if it was actually OT.
When that time comes, if it comes, then you'd be within the
guidelines to post it.
Preemptively posting it just in case it later becomes some new
phenomenon is not ideal.
nubinetwork wrote 1 day ago:
You say that, but there was a big thread on Val Kilmer on the
front page this morning...
bee_rider wrote 1 day ago:
This is not really mysterious or anything, though, right? They
allow bending of the rules for stuff that is not likely to
devolve into a big stupid political flame war, because, like,
pick your battles.
Also Iâd expect there to be some annoying edge cases if they
tried to ban that sort of discussion. I mean, Kilmer is not a
tech person. But tech people die sometimes too. Arguably
discussing their life as people is outside the scope of the
site. Maybe we shouldnât have had a conversation about how
great a guy Mr. Moolenaar was and just discussed the technical
aspects of his lifeâs work. But, come on, thatâd not really
be a human way of responding to somebodyâs death, right?
If weâre going to have these sort of lightly rule breaking
threads, then I donât think it is necessary to ask the mods
to adjudicate exactly whoâs technical enough to warrant one.
Itâs a fuzzy spectrum anyway, we have tech people, tech
policy people, STEM outreach people, tech YouTube influencers,
celebrities that played beloved nerd characters.
kubb wrote 1 day ago:
He died, I'm fine with making an exception for it.
milesrout wrote 23 hours 18 min ago:
Why? He isn't relevant to HN at all. Is every celebrity death
newsworthy on HN now?
kubb wrote 22 hours 39 min ago:
Maybe he was significant to a lot of hackers. The death was
also untimely, which reminds us to cherish the time we
have. Many of us are in our 50s or 60s.
bowsamic wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah the flagging is definitely much worse than it used to be. Iâve
seen very legitimate LLM critical posts with lots of upvotes and
comments flagged
dang wrote 1 day ago:
Many people feel that flagging is worse than it used to be, but
they don't agree at all on what should or shouldn't be flagged.
That makes this feedback less actionable than one might assume.
HN gets tons and tons of threads that are critical of LLMs, so it's
possible that the ones you're seeing get flagged are just below
median quality and/or overly repetitive of previous discussions.
Tadpole9181 wrote 23 hours 59 min ago:
Hey, Dan. I'd be really interested if you could share more about
the metrics. As the climate of the world around us has changed, I
think a lot of us at least feel flagging has become a cudgel used
to silence opposition. Me, for criticism of the current
administration. Others, for their views on topics like gender.
Maybe we just care more and notice it about that subject now.
Maybe it's always been this way. But while you often leave long
comments that go into how these systems work and the struggles
with trying to adjust them or understand of it's even necessary
(good stuff), I would be fascinated to see a blog post or
something where you really give us a talking to about the state
of the community and anything y'all have been trying on your end.
Just a thought, obviously, you have a whole job moderating
already! Have a good day!
dpifke wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
Dan and Tom can speak to this, but by my reading of the
guidelines, "criticism of the current administration" and
"views on topics like gender" are both explicitly prohibited:
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological
battle. It tramples curiosity." ( [1] )
It has nothing to do with being on the side of "the opposition"
or "the man," it's because those sorts of posts inevitably lead
to the same, repetitive, off-topic debates and flame wars.
Flagging should be used as a cudgel against posts that break
the rules. There are plenty of places on the internet to
debate politics and gender; HN is not one of them.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Tadpole9181 wrote 22 hours 11 min ago:
No, I'm talking about stories that are extremely relevant to
hacker news and techies.
Which is attested to by Dan repeatedly manually unflagging
these posts afterwards, which is an explicit approval that
these posts follow guidelines.
pvg wrote 21 hours 15 min ago:
stories that are extremely relevant to hacker news and
techies.
That's a difficult argument to make, especially without
examples because at the end of the day, everything is
related/relevant to everything somehow. HN's on-topicness
remit is not really 'extremely relevant to techies'.
kstrauser wrote 1 day ago:
When I've found myself being publicly tsk'ed by the people around me,
I've taken a moment to try go figure out why they disapprove of what
I'm saying. It's been a useful life exercise.
aliqot wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think the person getting flagged is always deserving of the
dogpile. Your comment implies "you should take this time in timeout
to think about your actions" which is just a gentler form of
rhetorical struggle sessions, and not always warranted.
kstrauser wrote 1 day ago:
For sure. I've had comments flagged that I thought were perfectly
reasonable and non-controversial. My first reaction was to be
angry and annoyed. But then my kinder angels suggested that
perhaps I phrased my idea poorly and people misunderstood that I
was largely agreeing with them, or at least very respectfully
disagreeing. And then I decided to be more careful with my
phrasing next time.
dkjaudyeqooe wrote 1 day ago:
Shouldn't that be directed to those with an agenda who and are
flagging certain posts?
Those of us who complain about this highly targeted flagging just
want to avoid censorship. I can't see how we need to reflect on
this.
bee_rider wrote 1 day ago:
They are flagging posts that they see as pushing an agenda. There
isnât some official separation of agenda-less and agenda-full
ideas.
cbeach wrote 1 day ago:
Posts that break guidelines should be flagged, and the bar
should be pretty high.
I don't think there is a guideline that bans posts from
"pushing an agenda" (which would be very subjective)
AnimalMuppet wrote 1 day ago:
I draw a distinction between posts and comments here.
Comments that are "pushing an agenda" are noticeable because
they Just. Will. Not. Deviate. From. The. Party. Line.
Ever. They will never acknowledge an opposing viewpoint's
point, no matter how valid. It's not a good faith
conversation, and it deserves to be both downvoted and
flagged. When one side (or both!) is like talking to a brick
wall, this is often what's going on.
Posts are harder. If user X posts articles pushing a
viewpoint, that's harder to prove that they're intending to
do that. Or it would be, except that user X will also
usually be active in the discussion about the article, and
their comments will fit the above pattern. If you see that,
then you can say that the post was probably pushing an agenda
as well.
bee_rider wrote 23 hours 41 min ago:
Despite being a small-ish site, HackerNews does still
suffer from the Reddit problem of having enough users that
you often donât get to really know anybody. Realistically
most conversations here only go back and forth for like 3
or so comments on each side. I mean, the site is structured
to promote that kind of thing; reply buttons start getting
hidden after a point, right?
I donât think anyone really can be convinced to deviate
from a strongly held political belief in a handful of
posts. At this point I think most people with any interest
in politics have already seen every path through 4 or so
posts around their opinions.
Standard talking point, standard counterpoint, standard
objection that the the counterpoint is not back by data,
request for citations, citation, argument that the math was
wrong, and by now the thread is a week old and weâve
forgotten about it.
So, I wouldnât say it is an issue of people being bad
faith or overly obstinate. Itâs just a bad format. Old
phpBB boards and those sorts of sites were better for this
sort of stuff, despite being mediocre, because at least you
could remember who was who.
AnimalMuppet wrote 22 hours 51 min ago:
All right, here's an example. X makes a post on one side
of a position. Y makes a thought-provoking reply on the
other side. X replies with "So what's your point?" X
either fails at reading comprehension, or X is trying to
make it look like Y didn't have a point, because X
doesn't have a good reply to Y's point, and X wants
everybody else to not notice that Y actually had a good
point.
I hate seeing that. It's a bad-faith argument. It's the
sign of someone who's just there to argue, not to have a
curious conversation. That is, it's a sign of someone
who isn't within the spirit of the site guidelines.
No, I don't think this is just my personal bias against
that style of posting. It's fake and juvenile, and it
has no place on HN.
Another way you can tell: When they're replying to 20
comments with the same 2 or 3 talking points. That's
someone who's there to do battle, not to have a
conversation. They aren't really replying to the 20
comments, either - they're just spraying the same canned
responses all over the place. That's not a conversation;
that's a tape recorder in transmit-only mode.
dpifke wrote 1 day ago:
From [1] : "Please don't use Hacker News for political or
ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
"Agendas" are often ideological battlegrounds. I flag
comments, even those I agree with, that I recognize from
experience are going to lead to the same tired, off-topic
debates and flame wars.
Lately, I've also been maintaining a personal uBlock Origin
filter list to hide certain prolific rule breakers. I would
love if HN had an equivalent built-in "killfile"[0]
functionality for auto-hiding submissions and comments.
(This has been suggested to the admins, and was seemingly
received favorably, but I'm sure it's a matter of resources.)
[0]:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
Teever wrote 1 day ago:
How do you feel about flags being public?
cbeach wrote 23 hours 0 min ago:
That would be very positive IMO. It would expose bad
actors.
However, the bar for creating new accounts is low, so bad
actors could create lots of accounts cheaply and use them
for flagging. That's why I think flagging needs to be a
privilege that requires a high user "trust level" - see
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43559629
dpkirchner wrote 1 day ago:
Forums like this are "censored" and that's a really good thing.
We don't need a steady stream of (for example) hate for women,
minorities, and trans people that you see on truly uncensored
forums.
fwip wrote 1 day ago:
This is correct. For the people who disagree, go read Slashdot
at -1 for a while. Then pretend that you're one of the people
who are targeted by that vitriol, and think about how much
you'd read the HN comments if they were like that.
cbeach wrote 1 day ago:
All illegal speech should be hidden from public discussion.
However, it would be disconcerting if stating biological facts
led to censorship on a forum that focusses on science and
technology.
The definition of "hate" has been stretched a lot over the last
few years, and if that restricts discussion of facts and ideas,
then it is harmful.
kstrauser wrote 1 day ago:
One major problem is when people presume that their
simplistic understanding of a subject is factual, and that
everyone else is going off emotion. For example, some people
will erroneously claim that the 2 genetic human options are
"XX = woman, XY = man". Those seem to be the most likely
combinations, partly because we don't collect DNA from 100%
of the population and compare it to the observed anatomy, but
they're clearly and documentedly not the only options.
Even without considering trans people, it's factually untrue
that "XX = woman, XY = man, and those are the only
possibilities." And yet, people who stopped at high school
biology will argue until they're blue in the teeth that
anyone with a more nuanced take is anti-science.
biddlybop wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
Yes and some people will also make scientifically
inaccurate claims like "sex is a spectrum" and "there are
more than two sexes" and "it is possible for humans to
change sex".
There's a great deal of misunderstanding around this topic.
Having open-minded, interesting and reflective discussion
about topics like this should however lead to greater
understanding. But that is not possible if it gets flagged
and censored.
Zak wrote 1 day ago:
"Stating biological facts" is code for an opinion about how
society should view trans people, which is off-topic for HN.
cbeach wrote 1 day ago:
If stating certain facts is made illegal (by our
democratically-elected representatives) then by all means
HN will need to censor those facts for the sake of its own
self-preservation.
But until then, we should be free to state facts.
> The old adage âI may disagree with what you have to
say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say
itâ was once a touchstone of liberal society. Having been
involved for most of my adult life in areas of social
debate, it was a phrase I once commonly heard. Not any
more.
> Instead, public discourse is marked by efforts to find
offence, destroy the character of opponents or ensure
reason is smothered by emotional manipulation.
> -- John Deighan
URI [1]: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/banni...
fwip wrote 1 day ago:
"Stating facts" does not mean you are following the other
rules of the site.
For example, if you irrelevantly post "My software is on
sale now for 10% off and here is the link!" on every
story, everything in it is factual, but it's spam
regardless.
I'm sure your specific facts that you want to post are in
service of a particular social or political viewpoint you
are trying to push, one that the people flagging find
either off-topic or odious. And, given that you refuse to
elaborate on what specific facts you think are banned,
reveals that you think you only can convince people by
being vague about what specifically you mean.
cbeach wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
I'd love to be clearer about my common-sense,
scientifically-backed viewpoints, but if I did so it
might result in hostile action being taken against me.
So I choose not to.
Not because I'm insincere about my views, or because I
believe they are harmful - but because the activists
pushing the ideological views I oppose have been
demonstrably violent and destructive.
fwip wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
[flagged]
dkjaudyeqooe wrote 1 day ago:
I agree, but when that is abused because of a minorities'
preference, then it's bad.
That's what's happening here.
dpkirchner wrote 1 day ago:
I think we need to get specific -- what preferences are you
referring to, and who is the minority?
EcommerceFlow mentioned opinions that are "very normal
nationally." I don't want to assume the worst so I'm trying
not to read in to that.
bee_rider wrote 1 day ago:
I mean, I donât generally like to go over somebodyâs
posting history because it feels like stupid very-online
silliness, but they brought it up.
I see some unflagged center-right political opinions
sometimes. It is stuff that a mainstream democrat would
probably disagree with but find, like, not odious or
offensive. Therefore I think they are just getting flagged
because any political opinions here have a chance of
getting flagged. This is how the website is supposed to
work, if we as a community decided that mainstream
political opinions were ok, the site would become a place
to argue about what exactly is considered mainstream.
ceejayoz wrote 1 day ago:
Sometimes you're right, sometimes they are. Sometimes, as the Rick
& Morty quote goes, "Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes
you cheer."
kstrauser wrote 1 day ago:
For sure, but then the followup question is "do I want to spend
my time and energy around a bunch of people I think are wrong?'
Tadpole9181 wrote 1 day ago:
Often times, you comment not to change the mind of the person
you're replying to, but to provide a rebuttal for the readers
at home. If nobody challenges problematic ideology or corrects
misinformation, it can spread like a disease.
ceejayoz wrote 1 day ago:
If they're correct, maybe?
kstrauser wrote 1 day ago:
If they're correct, and constantly telling you you're
wrong...
ceejayoz wrote 1 day ago:
⦠you have an opportunity for self-improvement.
toomuchtodo wrote 1 day ago:
Congrats Tom! Thank you for your service.
Natsu wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome, Tom!
noleary wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome, Tom! Thanks for supporting this community for so long. Your
work is much appreciated!
airstrike wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure if I should say "welcome" or "congrats" so maybe a little
of both!
Moderation is a huge part of what makes HN so valuable, so it's good to
hear dang is getting some much needed help as this place apparently
won't stop growing
pimlottc wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
"Well, grats!"
DIR <- back to front page