Comment by neya
5 days ago
I wonder what makes a platform like HN work, but not the others.
In almost every other platform moderators are just sad, angry little entitled narcissists who love exerting control over others. This has been proven time and again across multiple platforms:
Wikipedia
Quora
Stackoverflow (surprise, surprise!)
..
And basically anything else that depends on those so called moderators for fairness and equality. It would be interesting to experiment using an LLM with explicit set of hard guidelines (like outlined in the Reddit's code of conduct) and see how it behaves. Sure, LLM's are biased due to their training sources, but I'm curious to see if they will be as biased as human moderators. We need the HN formula for the rest of the platforms (I know HN doesn't use AI) with or without AI.
Dang. Dang makes this work.
What an insanely hard job, done with far more grace and far fewer mistakes than I could possibly pull off.
Thank you for this corner of the internet, dang (and a couple others).
Edit: mobile typos
Dang?
Dang is one of the mods that keeps the average HN convo quality higher than a lot of the internet without being a power hungry dick.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang
The overwhelming majority of question closures on Stack Overflow are not done by moderators. And they are done according to clear guidelines that are openly and publicly discussed on the meta site, which have reasons behind them that have been discussed over many years and refined according to the community's consensus about the purpose of the site.
The overwhelming majority of people coming to Stack Overflow are expecting the site to provide something that it explicitly is not trying to provide. The site in fact exists specifically because of frustration with traditional forums where people did get the UX they expect from Stack Overflow (i.e.: individualized volunteer consultation and troubleshooting).
Asking a question on Stack Overflow is not about making your code work — no matter how much users might want their code to work, or want Stack Overflow to function that way. By design.
The mods here are paid that's why.
But getting paid doesn't guarantee being neutral. I think it's more about the principle and vision than just the pay.
Getting paid means the mod has been vetted, is (presumably) being supervised in some way or reporting to someone, and thus is expected to adhere to some standard or protocol (however loose it might be). Getting paid comes with rules of the job and that alone makes paid moderation far more structured and with more potential for effectiveness than unpaid moderation.
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I think we just got lucky it happened to be dang.
I've asked myself this many times. It warrants a study.
I have managed large sites where I had to recruit mods. I would recruit the most popular and lovely users to be mods, and universally I would be forced to ban them within about 6 months. The power would go to their heads and every one of them would turn into a fascist dictator just banning anyone who spoke out of turn and deleting any content they didn't like.
>I wonder what makes a platform like HN work, but not the others.
Does HN work? We are not allowed to discuss all kinds of things. There are vague and unpublished rules about how things are ranked and how the front page is managed.
Did you know that HN accounts owned by people who have been selected by YC are "special" and can see each other highlighted orange?
How many flags does it take to kill a discussion?