I thought I clicked the wrong thing at first. In case an explanation helps: this is another comment thread where dang (HN's moderator) has a long and deep conversation about HN and why it is the way it is.
Great comment by @dang downstream in that thread. I missed it the first time around. Thanks @jackquesm!
My little bit to add here, for what it's worth. (I've been here since the first few months or so). Good conversations don't have to involve a back-and-forth with your ideas always being involved. In huge groups of people, many times I find it good enough to try to add something useful to the discussion, provide a link for more depth if necessary, and then shut the hell up. It's not the "me" show.
I post stuff I've created all of the time here that doesn't get traction. As the old saying goes, thems the breaks, kid. Every now and then some oddball thing I've said or posted will take off, and that's a pretty cool feeling, but I learned not to chase that feeling. Instead just try to be a decent and respectful participant and delete more content before you hit the "send" button than you actually post. The rest of it is pretty much effectively random. (Insert discussion here about how some folks have such a good reputation that it doesn't matter. I don't like it. Many of them don't like it. But it is what it is)
> Quite a few HN users, including some of the most prominent ones (and some of the best writers too), started off with a pugnacious commenting style and learned over the years to modulate that in the interest of curiosity, both in themselves and others. That's the learning curve we all have to go through here, and are still going through.
Not saying I'm prominent or a great writer, but here's an example from my own posting history showing two comments with the same general message, but the first one done in an unnecessarily provocative and condescending way, and the later one done after learning how to tone things down:
It's interesting. There _is_ a monoculture here, perhaps even an echo chamber, but it doesn't break down along the usual lines.
I like good conversations, like most. Not arguments, but folks simply talking and asking questions about things that they have massive internal disagreements about. I find such conversations useful to understand better both others and myself. (And I don't mean necessarily politics. Anything, really, except perhaps for that tabs-versus-spaces thing. Ain't going nowhere near that one)
In that spirit, I remember posting links to essays I've written like "Does God Exist?" (It was a recap of a Summer spent reading and listening to essays and lectures on the subject)
I would not do that today. In a big way, the site has gotten more, well, mediocre. It has somewhat unwritten standards and dang and the bunch do a great job of helping us keep them. But there's this huge list of rules and topics about content that are strictly enforced by the mob, and they wax and wane throughout the day. For instance, I am more likely to get a lot of traction on an interesting article if I post early in the morning, when my European friends are starting their work day. I get better traction on comments later in the day, when my California friends are finishing up their day. Beats me why and I haven't looked into it.
About every month or two I get a comment downvoted. The last one was back in March when I pointed out that types can completely replace unit tests for pure FP code.
I used to consider such downvotes an indication that I had misread the room, I was venturing somewhere I shouldn't. I would delete them if I could. Then I noticed some getting downvoted a lot only to come back with a positive score after a few days. There was a big element of randomness to it and not much useful signal in all of that noise. Now it's about 50/50. Half the time I delete those comments if I can. The other half of the time I wear that like a badge of honor. I meant no disrespect and was only trying to move the conversation along. Hell if I'm going to read a lot into what's mostly noise.
I've been on the net since it went public. I'm a slow learner, and it's taken a lot of time, but I no longer worry about all of the wrong people on the internet. I still wonder where the guardrails are, and how groups of people solve problems, but I'm much happier watching than I am adding to the noise.
> Good conversations don't have to involve a back-and-forth with your ideas always being involved.
That's a great point. Generally my favorite part of the comments are all the little atomic nuggets of wisdom that folks post in one-off comments that are just tangentially related to the topic. To be honest I find most of the "conversation" threads to be tiresome as the typically just consist of 2 or 3 people talking past each other until the thread peters out.
Forum moderation is... fascinating complex. Because not only do you have a complex immediate system: you have a complex system with memory (i.e. individual posters stick around).
As a consequence, moderation (the verb) has tons of second+ order effects, as all interventions ripple out into future posts and attitudes. Sometimes in an opposite way to what you intended with your intervention (e.g. so angry about being moderated that my next three comments are written in anger).
> The problem with provocation and flamebait is easy to derive from first principles: you can't provoke or flame others into curiosity. (dang)
As clear a description of "why" as I've seen. And the statistical argument is a good one, because moderators never control who shows up. [0]
If a comment has a 60% chance of attracting a flame in response, then that comment is dangerous to the forum as a whole, and a responsible commentor will write it to decrease that as much as possible.
Personally, I find myself paring down my comments to minimal kernels, when commenting on hot button topics, because any excess verbiage is a potential target for a flame to notice and attach to.
[0] My quintessential example of this was putting in hours of moderating a touchy topic on the EVE forums, IMHO doing a decent job getting every calmed down, with good feelings all around, only for some jackass to pop into the thread for the first time with a borderline (non-moderatable) comment that lit everything back on fire. "I am Jack's broken heart", indeed.
Do you know how many writers are boring? Most people don’t read books. The books are boring, the awful writers became authors of books. Truly dreadful and boring writers. I don’t think people realize why people gravitate to ‘flammable’ writers on the internet. It’s the most interesting shit they ever read, literally, ever. Can we respect that on some level?
only for some jackass to pop into the thread for the first time with a borderline (non-moderatable) comment that lit everything back on fire.
My dear friend, I suffer from serious depression, and whatever chaos one person can create with words is pure joy to me. Do not moderate my happiness.
Internet flaming is only interesting for a little while, and then it gets boring and a little sickening, like a sugar high. Actually, it's usually not even interesting (in the intellectual sense) to begin with. It's exciting, agitating, activating—things that are easy to confuse with interest. Real interest is quieter and a little more stable.
I'm a big fan of classic hard-hitting literary wit, but it doesn't work on the internet. You need a smaller, closed system for it to work—like the literary salon Monty Python were making fun of here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uycsfu4574w.
I'm going to use the adjective "flammable" now to describe people who can be easily riled up into political rage. It's great because it emphasizes that not only is there a match, there's tinder.
Agreed! I feel like it is also a good term for a psychologically disarming recognition. I am flammable about certain topics, and having that word now makes it easier for me recognize my flammability (and hopefully tone it way down), if that makes sense.
It's also great in that the same piece of wood can be more or less flammable given environment. Social media is a like change in climatic conditions leading to less rain and more evaporation.
> It's also great in that the same piece of wood can be more or less flammable given environment.
imo, it is not just the wood, but the environment too, which matters perhaps more:
>> But there’s nothing natural or inevitable about the specific ways that Facebook and YouTube corral our attention. The patterns, by now, are well known. As Buzzfeed famously reported in November 2016, "top fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined."
>> Humans are a social species, equipped with few defenses against the natural world beyond our ability to acquire knowledge and stay in groups that work together. We are particularly susceptible to glimmers of novelty, messages of affirmation and belonging, and messages of outrage toward perceived enemies. These kinds of messages are to human community what salt, sugar, and fat are to the human appetite. And Facebook gorges us on them...
>> The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.
I agree. It's a great metaphor. I'm also going to start using flamebait more frequently, where previously I just lumped it under the more generic "clickbait" (a flamebait headline is a clickbait headline but a clickbait headline is not a flamebait headline).
It's actually quite a modern idea that instead of controlling your own response to someone, you are better off responding as poorly as possible and blaming the person who you're responding to "for making you do it".
It's not good. Any gamers here will be familiar with the new "tilt" slang and how it actually places the blame on anyone but the person doing the wrong deed.
I do not enjoy this new world of blaming imaginary catalysts instead of blaming bad actors.
> It's actually quite a modern idea that instead of controlling your own response to someone, you are better off responding as poorly as possible and blaming the person who you're responding to "for making you do it".
I disagree. Almost no human behaviors are "modern" -- sometimes frustratingly so.
Historically, authorities would often blame those they subjugated for "making them" do something (monarchs, jailers, armies, etc.) It's also a very common model of spousal abuse.
In general, it's easier to blame someone else when you overreact than to face your own mistakes and apologize. I don't know any reason modern society would have invented that. The impulse to shift blame is intrinsic to having the human set of emotions.
@dang - big thanks for all you do to help keep this site relatively sane, civil, thoughtful, and relentlessly curious. Having moderated online communities before I know it’s not easy, but you do it better than any moderator I’ve yet seen. Big kudos, big respect, and big thanks.
Cultural moderation/curation like the one at HN leads to more discourse. After participating in online forums for 20 or so years I always feel more inclined to partake in forums in which the tone of discussion is friendly and level of discussion is high.
Free-for-all or laissez-fair moderation leads to a race to the bottom in the quality of posts.
This, along with @dang's link to his past posts about "expected value" (found in the discussion linked to above) [1], was like reading Bartosz Ciechanowski's post on internal combustion engines [2] but for HN.
Thanks for all your work, @dang. Good to see that there's a philosophical soul at the helm. Would love to meet you in person one day.
Honestly, I’m here because I want to hear from people smarter than me (on certain subjects) what they think on those subjects, and in so doing maybe I’ll become a little more smart. I do not care what those people think about me thinking about their discourse, quite the contrary, I wish they’d state their opinions/facts like I wasn’t even reading. The same goes for me, of course, I really don’t care how my opinions/statements are received by those reading them, they might be seen as true, false, or a combination of the two, but I do not really care what impression they (the statements made by me) leave on the persons reading them.
Of course, I’m writing all these assuming the discourse is quite neutral, i.e. that it doesn’t involve personal attacks or the like.
The weird things about personal attacks are that sometimes it can be very difficult to figure out what might be perceived as a personal attack by someone else. Which is why a certain amount of conservatism in your communication is so important when you are participating in large public forum of semi-random people. Pretending like your words won't be taken exactly as you meant them means you won't learn how best to communicate in that context. You won't pick up on the cues showing you perhaps accidentally crossed a line with some portion of audience.
If you then blame the audience for how they reacted to the communication and don't adapt but instead dig in even more then a flamewar happens and your opportunity to communicate disappears.
Readit News
My little bit to add here, for what it's worth. (I've been here since the first few months or so). Good conversations don't have to involve a back-and-forth with your ideas always being involved. In huge groups of people, many times I find it good enough to try to add something useful to the discussion, provide a link for more depth if necessary, and then shut the hell up. It's not the "me" show.
I post stuff I've created all of the time here that doesn't get traction. As the old saying goes, thems the breaks, kid. Every now and then some oddball thing I've said or posted will take off, and that's a pretty cool feeling, but I learned not to chase that feeling. Instead just try to be a decent and respectful participant and delete more content before you hit the "send" button than you actually post. The rest of it is pretty much effectively random. (Insert discussion here about how some folks have such a good reputation that it doesn't matter. I don't like it. Many of them don't like it. But it is what it is)
> Quite a few HN users, including some of the most prominent ones (and some of the best writers too), started off with a pugnacious commenting style and learned over the years to modulate that in the interest of curiosity, both in themselves and others. That's the learning curve we all have to go through here, and are still going through.
Not saying I'm prominent or a great writer, but here's an example from my own posting history showing two comments with the same general message, but the first one done in an unnecessarily provocative and condescending way, and the later one done after learning how to tone things down:
Score: -2, confrontational, no productive discussion generated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581452
Score: +95, modulated, resulting in better discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997427
I like good conversations, like most. Not arguments, but folks simply talking and asking questions about things that they have massive internal disagreements about. I find such conversations useful to understand better both others and myself. (And I don't mean necessarily politics. Anything, really, except perhaps for that tabs-versus-spaces thing. Ain't going nowhere near that one)
In that spirit, I remember posting links to essays I've written like "Does God Exist?" (It was a recap of a Summer spent reading and listening to essays and lectures on the subject)
I would not do that today. In a big way, the site has gotten more, well, mediocre. It has somewhat unwritten standards and dang and the bunch do a great job of helping us keep them. But there's this huge list of rules and topics about content that are strictly enforced by the mob, and they wax and wane throughout the day. For instance, I am more likely to get a lot of traction on an interesting article if I post early in the morning, when my European friends are starting their work day. I get better traction on comments later in the day, when my California friends are finishing up their day. Beats me why and I haven't looked into it.
About every month or two I get a comment downvoted. The last one was back in March when I pointed out that types can completely replace unit tests for pure FP code.
I used to consider such downvotes an indication that I had misread the room, I was venturing somewhere I shouldn't. I would delete them if I could. Then I noticed some getting downvoted a lot only to come back with a positive score after a few days. There was a big element of randomness to it and not much useful signal in all of that noise. Now it's about 50/50. Half the time I delete those comments if I can. The other half of the time I wear that like a badge of honor. I meant no disrespect and was only trying to move the conversation along. Hell if I'm going to read a lot into what's mostly noise.
I've been on the net since it went public. I'm a slow learner, and it's taken a lot of time, but I no longer worry about all of the wrong people on the internet. I still wonder where the guardrails are, and how groups of people solve problems, but I'm much happier watching than I am adding to the noise.
That's a great point. Generally my favorite part of the comments are all the little atomic nuggets of wisdom that folks post in one-off comments that are just tangentially related to the topic. To be honest I find most of the "conversation" threads to be tiresome as the typically just consist of 2 or 3 people talking past each other until the thread peters out.
As a consequence, moderation (the verb) has tons of second+ order effects, as all interventions ripple out into future posts and attitudes. Sometimes in an opposite way to what you intended with your intervention (e.g. so angry about being moderated that my next three comments are written in anger).
> The problem with provocation and flamebait is easy to derive from first principles: you can't provoke or flame others into curiosity. (dang)
As clear a description of "why" as I've seen. And the statistical argument is a good one, because moderators never control who shows up. [0]
If a comment has a 60% chance of attracting a flame in response, then that comment is dangerous to the forum as a whole, and a responsible commentor will write it to decrease that as much as possible.
Personally, I find myself paring down my comments to minimal kernels, when commenting on hot button topics, because any excess verbiage is a potential target for a flame to notice and attach to.
[0] My quintessential example of this was putting in hours of moderating a touchy topic on the EVE forums, IMHO doing a decent job getting every calmed down, with good feelings all around, only for some jackass to pop into the thread for the first time with a borderline (non-moderatable) comment that lit everything back on fire. "I am Jack's broken heart", indeed.
dang's first law of online comment moderation?
only for some jackass to pop into the thread for the first time with a borderline (non-moderatable) comment that lit everything back on fire.
My dear friend, I suffer from serious depression, and whatever chaos one person can create with words is pure joy to me. Do not moderate my happiness.
Perhaps online communities which share those values would be a better fit for you than one that explicitly stands against those practices.
I'm a big fan of classic hard-hitting literary wit, but it doesn't work on the internet. You need a smaller, closed system for it to work—like the literary salon Monty Python were making fun of here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uycsfu4574w.
imo, it is not just the wood, but the environment too, which matters perhaps more:
>> But there’s nothing natural or inevitable about the specific ways that Facebook and YouTube corral our attention. The patterns, by now, are well known. As Buzzfeed famously reported in November 2016, "top fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined."
>> Humans are a social species, equipped with few defenses against the natural world beyond our ability to acquire knowledge and stay in groups that work together. We are particularly susceptible to glimmers of novelty, messages of affirmation and belonging, and messages of outrage toward perceived enemies. These kinds of messages are to human community what salt, sugar, and fat are to the human appetite. And Facebook gorges us on them...
>> The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.
https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-n...
It's not good. Any gamers here will be familiar with the new "tilt" slang and how it actually places the blame on anyone but the person doing the wrong deed.
I do not enjoy this new world of blaming imaginary catalysts instead of blaming bad actors.
I disagree. Almost no human behaviors are "modern" -- sometimes frustratingly so.
Historically, authorities would often blame those they subjugated for "making them" do something (monarchs, jailers, armies, etc.) It's also a very common model of spousal abuse.
In general, it's easier to blame someone else when you overreact than to face your own mistakes and apologize. I don't know any reason modern society would have invented that. The impulse to shift blame is intrinsic to having the human set of emotions.
Is that medically speaking a thing? People who might be more emotional might just have an inflamed amygdala?
Dead Comment
Seeing the thought process of a moderator explained in such way makes me realize how low my bar for "good moderation" was. Thank you dang.
Free-for-all or laissez-fair moderation leads to a race to the bottom in the quality of posts.
Thanks for keeping HN a nice place everyone.
Thanks for all your work, @dang. Good to see that there's a philosophical soul at the helm. Would love to meet you in person one day.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2]: https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/, which I learned about from HN
Of course, I’m writing all these assuming the discourse is quite neutral, i.e. that it doesn’t involve personal attacks or the like.
If you then blame the audience for how they reacted to the communication and don't adapt but instead dig in even more then a flamewar happens and your opportunity to communicate disappears.