Comment by dang
5 months ago
The comments on this have already amply fulfilled my prediction. People's interpretation of this 3-second video clip are determined by their prior feelings about this person. HN is about learning, and nobody learns anything new in a thread like that
You guys are talking about this (both the stimulus and the response) as if it's some unusual phenomenon. It's not—it's the most standard aspect of HN moderation. If we didn't moderate this way, HN would be a completely different site; the front page would be filled with the latest outrages. To see that, all you have to do is multiply the present situation by a sufficiently large number.
It always feels as if the latest high-energy stimulus as the important one, the indispensable one, the one where things will fall apart if we don't stop everything and argue about it right now. HN is about trying to disengage ourselves from that brain-chemistry ratwheel. I realize that energy is running higher than usual because of the events of yesterday, but again, that's the sort of dynamic this site is about not being determined by—irrespective of political position or feelings about celebrities.
In past threads I've described this as the difference between reflexive and reflective discussion. If anyone wants to understand the basic approach, maybe some of that would help: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
> The comments on this have already amply fulfilled my prediction. People's interpretation of this 3-second video clip are determined by their prior feelings about this person. HN is about learning, and nobody learns anything new in a thread like that.
Good that we have this comment, and history has been written (as some users pointed out).
I hope a lot of you, audience of HN get in touch with the famous poem "First they came" and connect the dots.
>"The comments on this have already amply fulfilled my prediction. People's interpretation of this 3-second video clip are determined by their prior feelings about this person."
There was absolutely nothing for millions of people to believe Elon had either nazi ideology or saw Nazi mannerisms as a valid populist angle before yesterday, I myself found this development very enlightening - and this is where I first found it.
As for the rest of your comment; ironically, I think flagging this as early as it was (I was there) was more reflexive than any comment you'd find in this thread. I understand where you’re coming from because moderation is crucial when discussions go off the rails. But there’s room for thoughtful conversation here, beyond the hot takes. Some comments will be reflexive or partisan, but letting the discussion happen (with supervision) can surface more reflective points, too. Shutting it down early misses those insights - in fact, it's caused more negatively reflective points on the trend of moderation here.
If that were true then yes, I could certainly understand why you think it's the wrong moderation call. But based on everything I know (or think I know) after 10+ years of doing this job, I don't believe it is true. It is too optimistic an assessment of the prospects of such a thread.
One point that might be worth adding (or maybe not, but here it is): when you say "moderation is crucial" and "letting the discussion happen (with supervision)", I feel like you're overestimating the capacity of moderation. It is a scarce resource in several ways, some obvious some not. Part of this is about trying to invest it wisely.
For example, I put huge effort into moderating the thread about pg's "origins of wokeness" essay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682305) and ended up, at the end of a long day, feeling like I had hardly made a dent. (The current case would certainly be worse.) So when you argue for letting a particularly flame-prone thread burn and posit that it can be turned into a thoughtful conversation by sufficiently effective moderation, my sense is "I don't think that's realistic".
Anyhow, that's a secondary consideration, but it is consistent with the primary considerations.
(Btw I had deleted the first paragraph of my comment because I felt it was cuttable, but since you quoted it, I've put it back.)
And yet, the PG thread went away after it had its time on the front page, and isn't as big a deal anymore. Conversations were had, perspectives widened, words - calculated or callous - were shared, and the spirit of discourse was there. I think it was a great thread to learn more about what "woke" means to different people, and how we can angle our takes for it.
I'm glad you can admit that your attrition in moderating another post to your self-satisfaction was what encouraged you to make the decision to not even bother attempting with this one, not sarcasm. Self-awareness in our consideration of things is critical, and something I find us all (including me) needing more work on.
Moderation is scarce, yes, but a lot of executive decisions on the visibility of threads and comments are delegated to active users. As it should be - mind you, but it's not like it's fought alone here. I think a lot of us are willing to help, if it means topics worth talking about - especially when a lot of people think so - can stay around.
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Why is the only alternative option to hide the news from people without an account?
The set of [dead] posts on Hacker News is certainly a creative definition of "the news".
It's not possible to run a site like HN without moderation. However, if you delete moderated posts outright, users will rightly complain about censorship. I'm not referring to the politics of the last 10 years when I use that word; I'm talking about 2006 or so, when pg was first designing HN. The solution he came up with, which has held up well over the years, is not to delete moderated posts, but rather to tag them as "[dead]" in a way that anyone who wants to read them is welcome to.
So what you call "hiding the news from people without an account", I call "not deleting anything and making sure that anyone who wants to can read the complete set of moderated posts".
This is in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and there's lots of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
(p.s. for those who like precision: HN does also have deletion, but only the author of a post is allowed to delete it, and only if it didn't have replies. We sometimes delete posts when users email and ask us to, but we never do this as part of moderation.)
Apologies, I did not mean to imply that the set of [dead] posts was "the news".
Rather, I understand and appreciate the moderation strategy as it applies to discussion.
That said, there's a subset of intellectually stimulating news that also happens to not be great discussion material.
In the hypothetical where there's some important news that warrants being seen but you know the discussion would be impossible, why is there no option to just lock the discussion?
Again, this is a hypothetical where the* news is deemed intellectually stimulating, important, or otherwise deserving* to be shown.
I trust you have a reasonable answer, I just didn't see it in your comment.
I respect the efforts you put in and the wonderful place it carves out on* the internet. Thank you!
Edit: edits
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This isn't a news site.
This is a forum site for discussion between people that have accounts.
Given the technical background of the forum demographic having an account that's either largely anonymous or directly tied to a real identity is no great drama.