Man this comment give me PTSD from the early reddit days. If you read nothing else in this comment: You're doing a great job solving a hard problem, keep it up!
> well, the reason that's not done yet is because moderation takes 90% of my time, answering emails takes the other 90% of my time, and counteracting abuse takes the other 90% of my time.
So much this. There just isn't enough time with a small staff.
> Most haven't figured out that the above-board way to do that is simply to make interesting contributions
So much this too. This is what we always told people on reddit -- brands would ask us "how do I get more popular on reddit" and we tell them, "make interesting content".
> Almost everything that people think they're seeing about this is pure imagination and projection, entirely determined by the strong feelings that dominate high politics.
Same with all social media. People assume governments have heavy handed control of all content on social media, when in most cases the government couldn't care less. They focus on using propaganda to control individuals and then let those people make a mess of social media.
Your whole post resonates with my experience on the inside of moderating a big social media site and meeting with moderators of other big sites.
I'll be honest, at first I wasn't too keen on you moderation style, as I found it too heavy handed. But I take that back. HN doesn't cover everything I want to talk about (I go to reddit for the rest), but what it does cover, it covers better than reddit does.
So thank you, and I hope you get some more help with one of those 90% jobs!
> They focus on using propaganda to control individuals and then let those people make a mess of social media.
There was an interesting report in German TV, where they analyzed a paper looking for bot patterns in Twitter. That paper named some offending accounts, so what they did was PM one - and it turned out that it simply belonged to a pensioner with strong political opinions and a lot of free time. Interesting to look behind the cover some times (through I do think that TLAs realize this power and don't let that slide, to some extent at least).
> I'll be honest, at first I wasn't too keen on you moderation style, as I found it too heavy handed.
It's interesting how viewpoints diverge - for quite some time when I started reading, I actually did not realize that HN was moderated. If I may ask, where did you encounter so much heavy moderation?
> If I may ask, where did you encounter so much heavy moderation?
A couple places. The one that bothered me most was that titles would get changed without asking or notification to the poster. Sometimes they would get changed to something I didn't think made sense, and then I looked like I had done that, since there was no indication that it was changed. I guess I'm still not a huge fan when it happens to me, but I see why it happens.
I also didn't like having my comments detached or cooled. If you reply to a top level comment with a good comment that happens to generate a flame war under you, it will get detached from the top into it's own thread, and that just felt weird because it made it look like I made a non-sequiter top comment and also stifled discussion (which was the goal of course).
Also if you make a comment that gets a ton of votes but is perceived as off-topic, they will put a flag on your comment that makes it fall in the rankings. So based on the points and time it should be up at the top, but instead will be near the bottom, sometimes under the comments with negative scores.
Lastly, I have dead comments turned on, and I would see dead comments that I didn't think deserved to be dead. Eventually I got enough karma that I could vouch, which helped.
Those were my main moderation complaints. I still don't particularly like when it happens to me, but usually when I see it happen to other people I think, "yeah that makes sense".
> Also if you make a comment that gets a ton of votes but is perceived as off-topic, they will put a flag on your comment that makes it fall in the rankings. So based on the points and time it should be up at the top, but instead will be near the bottom, sometimes under the comments with negative scores.
This one is interesting to me, because I have emailed the moderators to do exactly this for highly upvoted comments I feel take the discussion into what I feel are the wrong places. I can understand that for a new commenter such tangents might be novel, but for someone who’s been around here for a while I am curious if you oppose such actions for the nth time that someone drags “here’s my article about new C++ feature” into “honestly C++ just keeps adding too many things, discuss”.
> well, the reason that's not done yet is because moderation takes 90% of my time, answering emails takes the other 90% of my time, and counteracting abuse takes the other 90% of my time.
So much this. There just isn't enough time with a small staff.
> Most haven't figured out that the above-board way to do that is simply to make interesting contributions
So much this too. This is what we always told people on reddit -- brands would ask us "how do I get more popular on reddit" and we tell them, "make interesting content".
> Almost everything that people think they're seeing about this is pure imagination and projection, entirely determined by the strong feelings that dominate high politics.
Same with all social media. People assume governments have heavy handed control of all content on social media, when in most cases the government couldn't care less. They focus on using propaganda to control individuals and then let those people make a mess of social media.
Your whole post resonates with my experience on the inside of moderating a big social media site and meeting with moderators of other big sites.
I'll be honest, at first I wasn't too keen on you moderation style, as I found it too heavy handed. But I take that back. HN doesn't cover everything I want to talk about (I go to reddit for the rest), but what it does cover, it covers better than reddit does.
So thank you, and I hope you get some more help with one of those 90% jobs!