It sounds like a insurmountable problem. What makes this even more interesting to me is that HN seems to have this working pretty well. I wonder how much of it has to do with clear guidelines of what should be valued and what shouldn't and having a community that buys in to that. For example one learns quickly that Reddit-style humor comments are frowned upon because the community enforces it with downvotes and frequently explanations of etiquette.
If we follow the logic of Yishan's thread, HN frowns upon and largely doesn't allow discussion that would fall into group 3 which removes most of the grounds for accusations of political and other biases in the moderation. As Yishan says, no one really cares about banning groups 1 and 2, so no one objects to when that is done here.
Plus scale is a huge factor. Automated moderation can have its problems. Human moderation is expensive and hard to keep consistent if there are large teams of individuals that can't coordinate on everything. HN's size and its lack of desire for profit allow for a very small human moderation team that leads to consistency because it is always the same people making the decisions.
Nope. There's been abuse in text-only environments online since forever. And lots of people have left (or rarely post on) HN because of complaints about the enviroment here.
This is essentially moderation rule #0. it is unwritten, enforced before violation can occur, and generates zero complaints because it filters complainers out of the user pool from the start.
The no-avatars rule also takes away some of the personalization aspect. If you set your account up with your nickname, your fancy unique profile picture and your favorite quote in the signature, and someone says you're wrong, you're much more invested because you've tied some of your identity to the account.
If you've just arrived on the site, have been given a random name and someone says you're wrong, what do you care? You're not attached to that account at all, it's not "you", it's just a random account on a random website.
I thought that was an interesting point on 4chan (and probably other sites before them), that your identity was set per thread (iirc they only later introduced the ability to have permanent accounts). That removes the possibility of you becoming attached to the random name.
Why would one be concerned with being wrong at all? Being wrong, thus being able to learn, is the whole reason for having discussions with others.
Once you’re confident that you can’t be wrong, you’re not going to care about the topic anymore. There is good reason why we don’t sit around talking about how 1+1=2 all day.
Some areas of reddit do similar things with similar results. AskHistorians and AskScience are the first two to come to mind.
This may be a lot easier in places where there's an explicit point to discussion beyond the discussion itself - StackOverflow is another non-Reddit example. It's easier to tell people their behavior is unconstructive when it's clearly not contributing to the goal. HN's thing may just be to declare a particular type of conversation to be the goal.
I think that has far more to do with this site being relatively low-traffic. Double the traffic, while keeping the exact same rules and topic, and it would become unreadable. It's easy to "moderate" when people clearly break the rules; but "moderation" can't do anything if the only problem is that most comments are uninsightful. Large numbers always ruin things, in real life or online. You can see that on this very website on Musk-related stories, with a terrible heat-to-light ratio in the comments.
It's controversial, but if the average IQ was 120 rather than 100, I doubt you'd have 1/10th as many issues on massively popular social media; most of the moderation issues would go away. The problem comes from the bottom-up, and can't be fixed from the top down.
The only thing HN has going for it imo is its size. Once it becomes a larger and therefore more attractive market for media, the propaganda will be a lot more heavy handed, like what happened to reddit as it grew from something no one used and into a mainstream platform. You definitely see propaganda posted on here already from time to time.
I think most posts are short lived so they drop off quickly and people move on to new content. I think a lot of folks miss a lot of activity that way. I know I miss a bunch. And if you miss the zeitgeist it doesn’t matter what you say cause nobody will reply.
The twitter retweet constantly amplifies and the tweets are centered around an account vs a post.
Reddit should behave similarly but I think subreddit topics stick longer.
There's also the fact that there's no alerts about people replying to you or commenting on your posts. You have to explicitly go into your profile, click comments, and then you can see if anyone has said anything to you.
This drastically increases time between messages on a topic, lets people cool off, and lets a topic naturally die down.
Very good point about the "fog of war". If HN had a reply-notification feature, it would probably look differently. Every now and then someone builds a notification feature as an external service. I wonder if you can measure change in the behavior of people before and after they've started using it?
Of course, that also soft-forces everyone to move on. Once a thread is a day or two old, you can still reply, but the person you've replied to will probably not read it.
Category 1 from Yishan's thread, spam, obviously isn't allowed. But also thinking about house general framework of it all coming down to signal vs noise, most "noise" gets heavily punished on here. Reddit-style jokes frequently end in the light greys or even dead. I had my account shadow-banned over a decade ago because I made a penis joke and thought people didn't get the joke.
Free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever, wherever, without any repercussions. It solely means the government can't restrict your expression. On a private platform you abide their rules.
Well, no. Free Speech is an idea, far more expansive than the law as written in the US constitution, or many other countries and their respective law of the land/documents.
Free Speech does mean what you describe it not as. But there is no legal body to punish you for violating the principle. It is similar to 'primum non nocere', translated roughly to 'do no harm', extremely common in medicine and something you may see alongside the 'Hippocratic Oath'. You can be in violation of that principle or the oath at any time, some people even get fired for violating either as a pretext to malpractice. Some even argue that it is quite impossible to abide by this principle, and yet, it is something many people take on as responsibility everyday all across the globe.
I won't argue about websites and their rules, they have their own set of principles and violate plenty of others, sometimes they even violate their own principles. But Free Speech is not just the law and interactions one may have with their government.
What now? You’re suggesting that the removal of the word “general” turns it into a concept that can exist and be disagreed upon? There can’t be conflicting general principles of free speech over which people consistently disagree? What a bizarre correction.
Where are the people arguing about Donald Trump? Where are the people promoting dodgy cryptocurrencies? Where are the people arguing about fighting duck-sized horses? Where's the Ask HN asking for TV show recommendations?
