Comment by hn_throwaway_99
1 year ago
> There are a lot of comments in this thread thanking “the mods” and I didn’t realize there was a mod team cultivating the front page.
IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just wrong.
Yes, there is dang, the single admin who posts publicly, and I guess it's possible/probable there are other HN admins who assist him. But 99.9% of the time when I hear people complaining about "the mods" or "power tripping mods" or "censorship", it's basically that other users saw what you had to say, and we just don't want to see it here.
It's also weird that occasionally people think there is some sort of "rule" about what can be flagged. There are obviously guidelines, but as this power is held by any normal user, it's basically whatever they want it to mean. For example, I frequently flag stories where I think the topic and article is totally valid, but where every single time I've seen the topic debated on HN it becomes a useless flamewar or is filled with the lowest quality commentary. At least for me, flagging isn't a value judgment on the "worthiness" of an article, it's simply about stuff I don't want to see on HN.
> IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just wrong.
Partially, but I think these are all symptoms for a more fundamental root cause: HN is just comprised of too many emotional, passionate users with fundamentally differing beliefs.
The usual song and dance with flagging goes something like the following with cryptocurrency:
1. User posts cryptocurrency article
2. People who passionately hate cryptocurrency start adding in emotional comments about how they hate it.
3. People who want to fight this passionate hate respond in kind.
4. The thread turns into a giant argument where nobody is willing to concede anything and everyone is just shouting at each other.
5. Either the flamewar detector kicks in (as it should) or everyone not in the thread tires of the shouting and flags it.
That's fine but regrettable when limited to some topics like crypto. But it's happening with social media company earnings reports, layoff posts, RTO discussions, posts about Musk, autonomous vehicles, and on and on.
dang (and the mod team?) are doing great work, but this is despite the feeling I have that HN is barely being held together into a cohesive community, and I'm struggling to even use the word "community" here. I feel the temperature of discussions has gotten a lot hotter here than it used to be and some basic work I've done with sentiment classifiers on comments here mirrors my perspective.
I just don't think a single community can handle so many passionate, opposed groups. It bubbles up by proxy in these sorts of flagging wars where so many articles get bumped off the page due to the inability of the community to discuss it well. Maybe the solution is to just discuss software as some people really want, but even then you get massive flamewars over things like Rust async. Even with interesting topics like VR posts, the overall temperature of the comments here is high enough that I've stopped bothering to comment as much as I used to.
It has always been the case and is in fact the stated premise of the site that it's barely held together in a cohesive community. The original mission statement was "see how long we can fend off Eternal September". So that's not alarming; it's how things are supposed to be. I suppose a perfectly stabilized cohesive community would be worrying, a sign that the site is staling.
I agree that a stable, cohesive community is a sign that the site is failing but I think we've hewed too far to the side of "barely holding it together" on this spectrum. I feel that it dissuades new, quality contributors from joining and instead attracts contrarians and arguers.
I think it's just that the community is so big now. If 1% of 100 regular posters are likely to get into flamewars over crypto, then that may result in a dozen comments or so. If 1% of 10,000 regular posters are flamewarriors, well...
An interesting heuristic I've seen play out a few times now across different communities (and that HN is starting to suffer from now on more contentious topics) is that too many comments on a post means that it's low quality. A handful of comments on an old post means there's not a lot to say about a topic; too many comments means that there's not a lot to change your mind about