It was a probabilistic method to filtering out the trolls, and it worked well. Trolls wanted to ban, but they themselves became the more-frequent targets of bans. Eventually, they would get frustrated with the bans and leave. The people that remained, stayed civil to not become a clear target of a ban. There would be brief chaotic behavior, but it never lasted. Cooler heads always prevailed.

Radiopaper mentions that there is a lot of room for exploration in this space, to try different models for creating emergent social behavior and productive conversations. I hope we see more of it!

This, I like. It would be interesting to experience this system.

My own personal policy on HN is: never downvote anyone for the content of their comment, prefer replying; if downvoting then it must be for extremely poor presentation, not content. That said, I don't tend to upvote or downvote a whole lot.

The troll behavior isn't punished, unless a moderator steps in, where arguably it would have reached the point of being quite obvious or outrageous. So on HN, it seems that if a user has an issue with trolling, they would have to e-mail HN about it. And here again, it would likely need to be something more on the continual, obvious, or outrageous side for actions to be taken.

I guess what I'm getting at is I have had a completely different experience and I'm wondering what lead you to feel the way that you do.

First, to prevent your troll from being greyed out, you need to be in alignment with the dominant Hacker News zeitgeist. Downvotes don't matter so long as enough people counter them with upvotes.

Second, to prevent being flagged, you need to craft your message in such a way that it could possibly be interpreted as well meaning. "Assume good faith" is a loophole to be exploited: "suck it bitch" overt hostility won't fly, but since "I'm just asking questions"-style disingenousness often can't be differentiated from honest inquiry, it makes it through the filter.

If you can master those techniques, you can troll any unpopular outgroup on HN without limit.

You can't troll the dominant faction without getting downvoted into oblivion, so the dominant faction believes trolling doesn't happen, but as for whether trolling of outgroups is happening...

... we can't say, as that would mean doubting the good faith of those "just asking questions". Nevertheless, we can observe that certain demographics who frequently get the "just asking questions" treatment are severely underrepresented on HN.

Out of curiosity, what 'outgroups' are you talking about? Some social groups are simply unpopular because we consider their views and perspectives to be disgusting or at least worthy of social censure; open bigots, people that don't wear shoes inside convenience stores. I ask because I've started to associate vague references to 'outgroups' with 'horrifying bigots that identify as conservative' and I wouldn't want to unduly lump whatever group you're talking about in with them.

The "outgroup" could be "horrifying bigots". It could be also be "economically right-leaning thinkers in a forum where the zeitgeist leans left".

What I'm personally concerned about the most though are demographics which are underrepresented in tech and even more underrepresented on HN, most obviously women but speculatively also Black people, Hispanics, and so on.

(This thread has over 300 comments so you may not have seen my other posts, but if you want further clarification you may wish to seek them out.)

I disagree that the tree structure of comments provides a sufficient remedy for pervasive low-grade hostility, and I posit that the problem of de facto exclusion of outgroups under "assume good faith" is unsolvable.

Concretely, tropes such as women being uninterested in programming, or having it easy thanks to equal opportunity programs, or bearing responsibility when they are sexually harassed, are considered legitimate under "assume good faith" on HN and so get discussed endlessly. Such discussions have the effect of driving women away and diminishing their participation, in anonymous-optional internet forums even more than in the office where freewheeling discussion of such topics would constitute a hostile workplace and be subject to EEOC sanction. The result is similar to discriminatory exclusion from a professional society, even though the mechanism is not a formal barrier but instead the fostering of an unwelcoming environment.

To be clear, I don't believe in the slightest that this outcome is what HN moderator dang would wish for. I think he's done amazing work to guide discussion in productive directions, and HN is noticeably more civil than it was a few years ago.

But I also believe that the "assume good faith" model has severe, underappreciated, deeply consequential problems. I think that a comment moderation system like RadioPaper or Gawker/Kinja, which allows outgroups a say in how much dreck they have to tolerate to participate, holds promise for avoiding those problems, and I would like to see how closely that model can approach the ideal of open debate and participation from a different direction.

Now if only RadioPaper had tech topic focus page, and I could use it like HN, lobste.rs, Slashdot, etc...

The only things I've seen eat dirt like that are jokes, and comments that were worded in an inflammatory way / presenting opinions as unassailable facts (even if they were right in my opinion). Mainly when people insult the Node.js ecosystem or some flash-in-the-pan new programming language

I haven't seen any Twitter-style anger over "sea lioning" *, or Reddit-style castigation over anything even slightly unpopular

* where people are having a public conversation on a public forum, but act like any attempt to engage with them is invading their private space

Saw a pretty civil disagreement in a thread where half the conversation was flagged dead. There used to be a vouch option but I guess I don’t have that anymore

Turn showdead on, you’ll start seeing it all the time (it feels like)

Yeah, what gives?

For example: every time a big political announcement is to be made or an event happens, the optimal game theoretic play is to ban them to prevent them from being able to set the narrative. And it just takes one person to do it. That's not hard at all: if you have millions of users, someone will do it!

In your example, the person would have to have posted recently in order for you to ban them, since bans only worked on quasi-recent posts. But yes, if you made yourself into a target, someone would ban you, and it was accepted in the culture because it was fun. It was acceptable that everyone got banned frequently, but far less frequently than the trolls. I should probably have mentioned that all users were anonymous to each other.

Was that on a per-thread basis i.e. if I start a thread, I have the power to publicly ban other users who reply to my thread?

the trolls! That's genius!

Intriguing idea anyway. Looking forward to seeing how it pans out.

Either party can keep adding messages to the conversation in any order, but only a back-and-forth is considered an update to the conversation as a whole, for the purposes of sending it to the top of the feed. That way, if a conversation turns sour, one person only needs to stop replying, and the conversation will gradually sink down the list into oblivion, even if new messages continue to be added by the ignored party.

I mean, the parent-comment was saying that folks could get the last-word by replying-then-blocking. It sounds like folks on your platform could get the last-word by simply not approving the other-side's response.

To avoid one side getting a last-word in a feud, it'd seem like you'd need to ensure that both sides could eliminate the entire conversation should they not be satisfied with its ultimate conclusion, such that there'd be no last-words in any feuds as there wouldn't be any (published) feuds. Short of that, it'd seem like one party could end up getting in a last-word.

Without actually trying it, this seems like a solid design choice.

"Why was I banned? I didn't say any hate speech. I just stated my favorite movie."

"I hate that movie, thus it is hate speech because it promotes hate (something that I hate)." or "Read the rules, figure it out"

Sometimes then the mods ironically send actual hate speech in their reply, then block you. Or you reply to them, and replies to mods automatically unlock the nuclear admin ban missiles "for harassment." God forbid you quote their literal message in a report which then triggers the automated word filter bans which are disabled for some reason when it's mod messages.

I'm not really surprised though, since

Yes, it can be abused by people who think that having the last word is "winning". One way to address that might be to add "Fred blocked Sam" to a thread in which both Fred and Sam previously posted, so everyone knows what happened.

Once you have been blocked, you cannot block back (because reddit no longer shows the user who blocked you as existing, while you're logged in). So if you want to harass someone, the best thing to do is to create an account and block them immediately.

Not only can a blocked person not respond to a blocker's comment or post, but they also cannot respond to any descendent of said post. Thus, on a small subreddit, or on popular posts in a large one, it's possible for a blocking peer to essentially "ban" you from the conversation at large.

By repeating this technique in the same subreddit, it's possible to gradually manufacture false consensus by preemptively silencing folks who would disagree with you. This user did an excellent study/proof when the new feature was launched:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/test...

However, if a block also prevents the blocked person from replying to the blocker's replies, that creates terrible incentives for abuse. Whoever implemented it was only thinking about blocks used against genuine bad actors, with disregard to how blocks could be (and empirically are) used by bad actors.

The same thing happens all the time on Twitter, which implemented the same "feature".

As strix_varius pointed out in a parallel subthread, this creates a perception of false consensus. It may be, more than any other thing, what's contributed to the hyper-politicization of those platforms. The platforms themselves enforce that any sufficiently engaged user, through enough defensive and offensive blocking, will end up in an echo chamber.

Block-prevents-replies allows bad actors to unilaterally silence opposition so that nobody else can see what the opposition's arguments are. *In a community that appears to be public.*

daenz's system is interesting (anyone can ban anyone, but to ban them you must reply to the comment you're banning them for, and others can ban you in return), and it might converge to stability, but each new troll will disrupt some discussions until they lose interest in being repeatedly counter-banned.

I think any system to exclude bad actors and prevent brigading needs to be designed some other way, so that silencing dissenters requires some consensus and can't be done unilaterally or by a small cabal.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/test...

The new way - blocking someone and restricting that person's ability to reply - is an aggressive UX.

My mind is blown at how simple and elegant this solution is!

Great work there.

So there is a reduced incentive to invest your time in writing a reply.

Unless, of course, there's some kind of mechanism that gives threads with higher engagement more prominence? That might create an incentive to have more inclusive conversations. Although that might incentivise trolling too...

EDIT: Perhaps combine the above with a reputation system, where you can see how ban-happy an original poster is. Since people don't like to waste their effort writing a reply that just gets ignored, ban-happy posters would be penalised by lack of engagement. Then platform provided moderation could just become a kind of 'meta-moderation' - basically just banning people who try to game the system (e.g. posting threads saying 'please reply so I can get my ban percentage down').

If neither party is adult enough to participate, then perhaps twitter and facebook aren’t the right places to have controversial discourse.

I could however see it leading to echo chamber threads, or sham threads where one party is deliberately providing a weak counter-argument, a bit like a fox news interview to a right wing politician.

It's just so frustrating to have no replies when you know the message have been read.

HN is free of such shenanigans and it's been so far the best experience I've had on the internet.

On Gawker/Kinja if you've been "followed" by a power user, your comment shows up right away. If not, your comment goes into "the greys", which are hard to see, until either the person you replied to replies or stars your comment.

I've spent a lot of time reading Jezebel and TheRoot over the years — they're a balm after experiencing the single-silo HN. The Gawker properties aren't what they used to be, but this commenting mechanism has its advantages. It truly defangs trolls. Jezebel and TheRoot could never operate without troll protections — there are so many disturbed characters hanging around trying the most vile stunts, you'd never manage to have a conversation proceed otherwise.

There's a significant flaw, though: the more that your interlocutor disagrees with your reply, the less likely it is that your comment will get approved. This doesn't apply to everyone on Gawker properties because there are lots of approved posters. I don't think the chained comment system would be that great unless it's supplemented by a way of approving/deapproving posters as well.

Sockpuppets.

It's probably trivial to gain a mere two accounts on this service to post a fake conversation of two sockpuppets attempting to "outwoke" each other. You can probably already see the arc of such a fake post in your mind.

(I emphasize I could have the wrong end of the stick about the design).

Edit : since the founders are reading this, i had an idea once about what an anti-twitter would be like and came to this idea : no message under 1k characters. Do what you want with that idea, i give it to you.

But maybe it won't be such a big deal in practice: in a way, it's kind of like enforcing a certain amount of politeness when conversing on someone else's turf; you've entered their 'house' and are expected to play by their rules while there.

On the other hand, when it comes to debate of any kind, there always has to be one party who gets priority over the other and can tailor the appearance of the outcome of the debate to a certain extent.

TBH, I'm mostly very curious what kind of behavioral dynamics would emerge around this—it's probably not possible to infer too much in the abstract. In any case, an interesting idea.

Are you considering a strongly-bound 1-account-per-person model with verified accounts?

It doesn't stop you from posting your own stuff at top level, just stops flames, I suppose?

If you get enough overhead from the platform from writing boilerplate comments, maybe you just stop?

One other worry is that those commentees who are willing to spend significant time moderating the comments they receive may not be exactly those who care about quality. To be honest, I wouldn’t want having to moderate the replies I get on HN. :)

“Whenever I write anything publicly I risk being pulled into the maelstrom, which I call the epistemological woodchipper. It's a risk.”

Hoping this works out!

In the end, I see this as a feature for discussions / subreddits - not exactly a business. But who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Granted I don't expect to write something bad but yeah, I just have this gut reaction I did something bad, like downvotes

Like a "shadow ban"

This feels like something that would be hard to get traction with, but hats off on trying to do something different and thinking through what social could be. Also, love the design and UX - great stuff!

As we were building Radiopaper, we developed a concept we call "social skeuomorphism." ... Social skeuomorphism is the idea that a social network should be designed to resemble the best social events in the non-digital world. This is tricky, because internet communication differs from in-person communication in many dimensions, and it's not immediately obvious which of those dimensions are the important ones. In a few of these dimensions internet communication might even be superior to in-person communication.

...But parties have a number of built-in safeguards to prevent this phenomenon from becoming toxic. If A approaches B at a party and begins speaking, B is expected to acknowledge the approach, but is free to leave the conversation quickly if desired. If A then follows B, refusing to terminate the conversation, A is being rude, and publicly so. At parties this is often sufficient to ensure that no one has to engage in long, unwanted conversations, or at least not too often.

Maybe this could be a complement to other social sites like HN or Reddit. Sometimes you see two people start to go back and forth in a subthread. Maybe that could be a cue to "take it to Radiopaper".

It's interesting I see this project, because I've long thought the problem with social media is that everyone can talk to everyone and anyone at any time. Like everyone is in a giant stadium with access to the PA to announce themselves... and everyone in the stadium can use it all at the same time. Real life doesn't work this way. While unfettered communication is nice, it is also overwhelming and positive and healthy communication needs filters and topics and such.

I'll definitely be watching this app and hopefully using it. There is a lot of opportunity here. I really enjoy the clean and simple interface. Personally, I think this is probably the best social media app and idea I've seen come through HN in a long time.

A 'contact me' button which quick copies a link would be a nice addition.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around a general use case then. It seems like a neat idea for discussions or debates between two people which have public value.. but most of the time when I'm writing directly to someone, why would I want to have it shared? Looking at other social networks, most of the time you want to share something with your social circle and generate a conversation which has more than two people or you message them directly. Am I missing something?

I think this is for people who like to have other people read what they wrote (as a sort of validation), but doesn't like having people who reply with no-effort content. So the userbase would be people who like having intelligent debates in the open, but in a selective way (not with people they deem "not fit to debate with")

* The OAuth scopes for login with Twitter are overly broad. This appears to be a limitation of Firebase Auth's SDK, it only supports the Twitter OAuth 1.0 API, whereas Twitter only provides more fine-grained scopes if we use OAuth 2. We're looking into whether we can make changes to Firebase Auth to contribute upstream that would let us request email addresses without permission to view your timeline, followers, etc.

* There are a few quirks with our UX on mobile devices, and Comments are not visible on mobile. We've focused on the desktop experience for reading and writing at first, but a lot of our users do come to us on Mobile, so making this better is a high priority.

* We're missing a lot of the standard social features you might expect from an app like this: following, reactions, @-mentions, topics, search, etc. These and many others are on our roadmap, but as a bootstrapped team trying to maintain a high quality bar, we're moving on them pretty slowly.

Without search I can't see how anyone could make much use of it.

I feel like, by avoiding some of the modern UI/UX landing page trends, it feels more authentic when I land there. I like it.

I would request some sort of topic subdivision like subreddits or hastags or something similar.

It is hard to know what a conversation is about or even how to post about a topic of interest.

For example, it would be interesting to see a discussion about being on HN and the impact on the user base

- don’t like someone’s response - simple accept it and no one will ever see the potential counter argument?

You're right that the conversations going on now are mostly a bit high-brow or formal. This is mostly an accidental feature of the way we rolled out the site to people we thought would like it. Many of them are professional writers!

But absolutely, Radiopaper is also a good place for banter or conversations about whatever (keeping in mind our content policy, naturally: radiopaper.com/policies). Sports gossip, politics, whatever — go for it!

So this platform proposes that you must make your comment agreeable to other party, which has its benefits; civil discourse, pleasant rebuttals, less polarising discussion. However it gives the power of censorship to each party, giving a false view of discussion.

What really makes a system resistant to trolling is "reputation", this can be in the form of points or even some kind of verification system. The best platforms respect this, and requires you to earn the right to be heard through time and dedication to the community. Points are a way of verifying that the user has had respectful discussion in the past, as users should only earn points through respectful discussion.

I conceived this idea independently some years ago (just the core of it: that all replies must be approved by their immediate parent) and am delighted to see it realized!

For a long time, I've been bewildered at the lack of innovation in online discussion. It's time for something new! There are so many ideas we haven't tried — see here for a list of just a few I've been thinking about:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28231904

    > Requiring each comment to be approved by the author of its immediate parent
    > (so you can disagree with each other, but you have to be kind)

I wish you the best of success! Let a thousand flowers bloom.

That is, this system requires comments to be approved by their addressees.

Suppose you write something to me, and I have something to say in return.

In Radiopaper, your comment to me would only be published if I (by posting my reply) consent to having your comment appear.

In your system, my reply to you would only be published if you (as the original author) consent to having my comment appear.

Or have I misunderstood?

(I agree with you that it would be cool to see more experiments about how to make online discussions work better.)

Some way to fan in the conversation and allow multiple participants as points converge could solve this but it sounds like it would be rather complex to get right.

Our thinking about this was that we want to make it as easy as possible to follow a conversation between two people, however long and involved the conversation gets. So, while conversations can branch endlessly, it's always easy to follow what any two people are saying to each other.

In the longer term, we might also add some features around seeing an overall conversation branching structure, but it's not on the short-term roadmap.

. Does this mean if someone doesn’t agree with your comment they can ignore it entirely, and nobody else in the conversation will ever know the comment was made? If that’s the case then wouldn’t it be possible to manufacture a sense of agreement (in the thread) by dismissing all unfavorable comments? Edit: Also if enough people of the same ideological leaning (or an army of bots) did this and engaged only with themselves, it could give the illusion that the general sentiment of users of your service is aligned in some belief or system of ideals or w.e? Idk, maybe I’m just spewing nonsense.. I like the overall idea and I wish your team the best of luck.

Unless the intent is just to maximally echo chamber the network, protect con artists from unfavorable replies and so on. Until someone takes a screenshot of your post, and posts their reply as a new root, and the point has been defeated...

I've experienced a similar commenting system to RadioPaper in use on the Gawker properties, and it's not bad. It is siloed. But just because there's a single silo at HN doesn't mean everybody sticks around in that silo.

You mean exclusion of moderate to right leaning opinions right? That's my experience. If not (or even if so), I've seen lots of discussion on HN where everyone thinks their pet viewpoint is getting unduly picked on. That's probably as good a sign of neutrality as one can find (not that I think HN reader moderation is neutral)

Edit: maybe I'm misunderstanding the replies but my point is that many people seems to feel like the overall forum sentiment is against them. I'm not saying HN has a demonstrable left-wing bias. People seem to be trying to refute that for some reason

There are apolitical reasons for this theory. I'm not conservative and found it to be in the realm of plausibility. For what it's worth, I've entertained it before it made headlines.

I feel like these are probably on two different levels, but given that you called it a theory and not a conspiracy, I think you'll also probably disagree.

You seem to imply it is some crazy far right conspiracy, but that wasn't the impression I got from skimming the Wikipedia article [2]. There's a good few serious people who consider it possible and while I'm sure some distorted version of it is weaponized by politicians, I don't see why that's reason to discard it.

[1] (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901824)

[2] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory)

Edit: I posted the wrong vanityfair link, fixed. Also regarding my terminology, "conspiracy" is a bit of a loaded term, and given the information in the vanityfair article I decided to keep my terminology more neutral

[1]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30870435

Do you feel that an intelligent, principled person cannot make a valid argument opposing you and your wife for any of these phenomena?

Having that debate drives away women. I don't know if that's the kind of "right-leaning opinion" you're talking about, but if it is, I would rather that we were divided into two silos: one silo where people talk about how women are not ambitious, and one silo with women.

Like, say one day that a very well researched finding comes out and proves that men are predisposed to be more violent, in reference to higher incarceration rates. Should it change how you treat other people, once it has been reasonably proven as fact? I think not.

The choice that someone makes to discriminate against a group based on statistical realities does not depend in the slightest on whether those facts are true. People easily pretend they are true if they are not, and if they are true it doesn't justify discrimination in the end either way!

Unfortunately these arguments seem to often end up just being in service of a goal like justifying discrimination, and when they aren't, certain others will show up to accuse the person of that even if not true. Sigh.

I wonder, are there predominantly female areas of society where members often worry about how their rules drive away men? Are nurses afraid to talk about men's propensity to not be caring in case it scares them off?

(I'm also a little bemused at your implication of what an 'uncomfortable idea' is, as well as the implication that hackernews is the right place for this, as well as the assertion that you can fragment social networks to satisfy people while ignoring the effects of critical mass - but there's too much to unpack)

Your second paragraph is irrelevant in this thread (which discusses HN specifically).

Edit: A forum that bans discussions like that, will probably be seen as left-leaning by some.

As for network effects, small forums still exist and serve people fine. You don't actually have to be on Twitter or HN to interact with people that you prefer.

I would like it very much if Radiopaper's approach, or some variant of it, made it possible to actually have a more enriching exploration of ideas.

it's not neutral, but it doesn't lean "left" or "right" per se. What I see is a preference for well-argued or immediately-obvious points, often with citations, that engage fully with whatever they are a response to. Dismissals, emotive arguments, citation-free when making bold claims ... these do not fare well.

Strictly speaking though, I think pro-science or anti-science is independent of left vs right.

Edit: I think I've only used the downvote feature twice on HN, and in both times it was for promotion of a ridiculous Trump-related conspiracy theory. Consider me left-wing biased, which I certainly am these days.

This is an absurd characterization that is only used by people who don't understand the difference between science and religion and think that calling someone "anti-science" is a way to avoid debate about their religious views. It's as embarrassing as it is offensive.

The dichotomy of "pro-science" and "anti-science" elevates science to an almost religious stature. Science is fallible, it's very hard to do and just as hard to interpret. It's also not the right tool for a lot of issues.

Increasingly people have been adopting being pro-science as a part of their identity as if science held some ultimate, unquestionable truth. To me it is akin to faith, it's an appeal to a higher authority that is used to shut down debate and paint some opinions as moral and others as immoral.

I suppose pro- or anti-religion isn't completely orthogonal to left vs right politics. Support for a dominant religion is more likely to be found on the right, as a means of social control.

A forum could be seen as left-leaning simply by having a policy that all contributors are equal and should be treated with respect. Desire for equality (of wealth and power) is pretty much the defining left-wing characteristic.

One thing i fail to understand about this viewpoint is why the relationship between the removal of replies and comments and "low-grade harassment and de facto exclusion" isn't more prominent. Someone might say something one doesn't like, but the one has very little real power over the someone just with a reply.

But if they have the power to delete what they say, it's much easier to reach the level of harassment and exclusion. There isn't a much stronger tool for harassment and exclusion than moderation tools used improperly.

I'm quite certain that I have done so on this very thread. I'm seeking an environment (a private forum) where certain lines of debate are less ubiquitous (because I believe those lines of debate drive away people I would like to engage with). Some people are surely interpreting that as exclusionary and discriminatory, and perhaps some see it as low-grade-harassment trying to get them to leave.

There's a important distinction to be made between immutable characteristics and identity tied to ideas, but that doesn't mean that they aren't experiencing those feelings.

> There isn't a much stronger tool for harassment and exclusion than moderation tools used improperly.

A forum's promise of open exploration of ideas is worthless for those people who have left.

What I like about the RadioPaper approach is that it enhances freedom of association. Perhaps in practice that may actually lead to a more enriching exchange of ideas than a "free-speech" shouting contest.

(I still think that the comment-approval mechanism is best used to audition new contributors for unlimited participation, though.)

Would you care to elaborate? I am genuinely interested, in part because of curiosity and also because I haven’t experienced this personally.

Everyone feels like they are targeted and disenfranchised, as a side effect of the nature of social media.

  All my left-wing woke friends are CONVINCED that the social media platforms uphold the white supremacist misogynistic patriarchy, and they have plenty of screenshots and evidence ... 

  All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends are CONVINCED the social media platforms uphold the woke BLM/Marxist/LGBTQ agenda and they ALSO have plenty of screenshots and evidence of times when...

I do not believe or claim that dang is personally biased against "my side". I think he tries incredibly hard and is rigorously driven to avoid bias because of the grand social experiment he's shepherding. It's our privilege to participate in that experiment.

What I claim is that the policy of "assume good faith" has an inevitable, unavoidable side effect of driving away outgroups. On reflection it wouldn't be just left-affiliated outgroups either — the mechanism is that leniency in moderation means that low-grade hostility is tolerated — BUT that hostility could be directed against the outgroups of any forum, and who the outgroups are is variable and forum-specific.

You can see that the people that control moderation on most social networks are political left, and aren't shy about discussing it. You can see that the political support from the social media workers leans to the left (I think over 99% of all political donations from twitter goes to the left). You see that these people routinely proclaim support for leftist political causes in their personal social media. Do you think there's a chance this influences their decisions?

Now, we've been told a lot about implicit biases and how people that think they are even handed may be still prejudiced even if they don't realize it, and need to take deliberate actions to ensure this bias does not influence their work. Do you think this also relates to people controlling social media, or they are unique caste of saints untainted by biases the rest of humanity suffers from? Or, more likely, they don't think they need to any take such actions, because they live in 99% agreement bubble? Do you think the existence of 99% agreement bubbles hinders their ability to evaluate their biases and enact measures to reduce their impact on their work?

https://melissamcewen.medium.com/a-guide-to-hacker-news-for-...

That author advocates that HN stay how it is — or rather, she advocates changing it from within. But I don't think it's possible — I believe that the "assume good faith" proposition leads to toleration of unlimited low-grade hostility that does not rise above the threshold of flagging. The result is that outgroups flee the platform. Have you not noticed the gender imbalance around here?

From what I can see it's pick your poison:

* "Assume good faith" — outgroups don't participate. Exclusion may not be the intent, but it is the de facto result.

* Siloed: outgroups can and will meaningfully participate, but debate is more constrained.

> I think it looks more like people interested in gender and identity based activism leave, and people interested in signal-to-noise ratio stay.

That's not true, as there are plenty of people discussing male-focused gender issues and male identity based activism, in addition to those discussing women, transgender, and universal gender issues.

> This is easily discovered by looking through the profiles of the top 100 posters and following the breadcrumbs.

Why would I want to do that? I mean, unless I am specifically interested either in gender activism (I am not), or in dating a top-100 HN poster (I am happily married) - why would I bother to research what kind of bits each of top-100 HN posters carry between their legs?

> That's not true, as there are plenty of people discussing male-focused gender issues

I would like to see some data supporting the assumption that male-focused gender issues and male-focused activism are discussed significantly more frequently on HN than female-focused gender issues and female-focused activism. This does not match my anecdotal impression - but of course I could be wrong. Could I see the source of your claims?

I only mention it to support the assertion that the gender imbalance exists. You wouldn't do it ordinarily.

> I would like to see some data supporting the assumption that male-focused gender issues and male-focused activism are discussed significantly more frequently on HN than female-focused gender issues and female-focused activism.

I didn't make such an assertion, as I was only rebutting the idea that "people interested in gender and identity based activism leave" per se. There are plenty of such discussions — a 700-comment thread on limb lengthening surgery just went by within the last day. The thread is filled with testimonials as to the discrimination faced by short men and the harms caused, including stories of heinous, callous bigotry.

(To which I say: yes let's please work together to be better to each other. Let's start from the assumption that it is human nature to be prejudiced and we all need to work to overcome our biases, rather than dividing ourselves into "x-ist"/"not-x-ist".)

I actually suspect that there may in fact be more male-focused gender identity discussion on HN than female-focused, but I haven't done the research. The misperception about that arises because men may not classify their own identity discussions as identity discussions.

The disagreement may be unsurprising, but I'd rather be persuasive. I'm not chasing "heretic" cred.

Gawker staff used to participate in the comments, but those days are long gone. That means that a top-level comment by anybody who isn't already pre-approved will almost certainly remain in the greys.

I miss the way it was, but the Gawker properties have gone through multiple wringers.

So I agree that the Gawker properties have serious problems, but I think that the commenting mechanism actually yields some pretty great results. It would be fab if Radiopaper could iterate and improve on that model!

Stupid people consider comments that disagree with anything they say “low-grade harassment”. This is visible all of the time when you look at people repeating falsehoods even about mundane things (not even hot button political issues). They become defensive about “being called out”.

We absolutely should not be encouraging any “conversation” systems that let people just hide any comment that they don’t pre-approve.

I've seen forum cliques and mass blocking kill off many sites back in the day, and this design would empower this attitude in such a way that it could never be changed.

The idea being that if viewers can see what the OP doesn't approve of, they can make a judgment as to whether that OP is making good-faith arguments and accepting reasonable replies or whether they are just trying to build an echo chamber

Additionally, other users on Radiopaper will understand the mechanism. So, if they see a controversial post with 100% fawning replies, they're going to understand what's happening, and discount the credibility of those replies accordingly.

When other comment on my posts:

    - % rejected
    - % disagreed but shown
    - % accepted

    - % rejected
    - % disagreed but shown
    - % accepted

The full set was -Agree -Disagree -Interesting -Beautiful.

We still use them internally. You can see what they look like here: https://twitter.com/DavidSchaengold/status/15202075451048468...

The former comments would present an opportunity for someone to try to reword them (and possibly steelman them), while the latter would be a signal to the commenter that people disagreed but appreciated their good faith effort to engage constructively.

And trolls aside, it seems that boring messages are less likely to receive a reply than ones that are more inflammatory or generally compelling. Is that true?

It's the usual spam problem. If people can generate identities cheaply, "who" based blocking will not work.

It's insanity, and will obviously never work.

>Edit: Also if enough people of the same ideological leaning (or an army of bots) did this and engaged only with themselves, it could give the illusion that the general sentiment of users of your service is aligned in some belief or system of ideals or w.e? Idk, maybe I’m just spewing nonsense.. I like the overall idea and I wish your team the best of luck.

It works like that in almos all cases where there is user voting system that can result in comment being invisible for other users. As one side gains momentum, it is for them easier and easier to block distending voices. After some time discussions start to look one sided and people that disagree just stop trying to engage. That feedback loop in the end turn such forum into an echo chamber(loaded term, but no side is free of it). Even more if moderators are on their side.

But there are also counter examples. Cases where models/theories advocated by comments are so disjointed from reality, facts that there is nothing you can even disagree on.

>>“The brain mistakes familiarity for truth,” van der Linden says. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-peopl... (this is one example, there are more that show this kind of problems for other ways of thinking)

There was a study(https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.intell.2018.03.009, https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-021-00006-y) repeating pseudoscience, hoaxes even if done to debunk them, caused people to see them as more likely because they become more familiar with them(and forget why/where they learned about them). So when someone repeats them to propagate them, harm cab be even bigger.

So there is argument for blocking harmful (in the end all of them end this way) misinformation to stop its effects on readers. But this approach is ripe for abuse, there is little stopping one from lumping into such category, theories/models one simply don't like/disagree with.

In the end, this is one of the reasons why assessing if something is true is hard, even harder if you add Internet into the mix.

In the end we are not perfect logical machines with same memory, we have flaws in our brains that can be used agnaist it, to persuade it into believing falsehoods.

You guys are gods.

A small technical nitpick, it seems cache headers are not set correctly for images and such right now. When you scroll up and down the homepage, the same images get re-requested again and again. Out of curiosity, why are the top items unrendered when scrolling down?

Thanks for highlighting the image caching issue, we'll look into it! As for the scrolling behavior, we render a sliding-window of rows to keep DOM size down, but the UX does need some work.

I had a look into it, and it seems we set the following headers when retrieving user images:

> cache-control: public, max-age=3600

So I believe your browser _should_ be caching these.

1) Message sending is already a victory condition

If I understand correctly, when someone comments, it's always forwarded to the OP. Many harassers will use that to send vile things to the OP. If accounts can be generated without limit, they'll flood the OP's inbox.

2) Since replies are firstly private, this means others will not have the chance to downvote

This deprives the system operator of some potentially valuable signals. Of course they can be brigaded too.

3) Opt-in once and receive a lifetime of abuse

It seems like your system allows for individuals to opt-in to displaying replies, but no way for them to opt out. Many trolls will consider it a game to deceive the OP with an apparently sincere reply and then they'll have an unobstructed channel.

I'm not even a specialist in these matters. Seriously, there are lots of people who are experts in troll fighting at this time, I strongly suggest you talk to them.

Also, if the Radiopaper team is reading this... You've probably gotten this from other people, but it is hard to know which conversations to enter -- it'd be helpful if they were organized with a title or topic or a tag.

It was a public question/answer or discussion site with, again iirc, public full ID profiles promoting so called known (famous?) folks/profiles. I call such people the “in folks”. In other words “influencers”. That’s what it seemed. First look gave an impression that those people are highlighted, not the content. Checked it on mobile - a quick check. It also reminds me of reco.com with focus on people like Bill Gates et al as id people who read books just for the pleasure of reading would take recommendations of Bill Gates (okay, this sounds too generalised!).

Organic conversation is the last thing that happens on such sites. It might be different and best wishes to people behind it.

I can’t remember the name. “Peach” comes to mind for some reason but I checked and Peach is not that. Name was something “get———“.com I think.

You can log in with OAuth, or by Email.

You can change your _display name_ on your profile page, and that's what appears publicly on the site (your email doesn't appear publicly, even if you log in by address!).

Today to get a custom profile URL like radiopaper.com/Dave, you just need to ask and we'll create an alias for you. There isn't a self-serve alias mechanism available today, but we're thinking about how to provide one. Any profile can be linked by the URL radiopaper.com/uid, for instnace my profile can be reached at https://radiopaper.com/user/AwQLwnOgQFdyDfNoYfNCSSsVdx43, "Dave" is just an alias.

Clearly having separate concepts of login method vs display name vs profile URL is all a bit confusing, this is helpful feedback!

Also, having a section in the profile where I could change my login email address would help with the UX.

Being able to change your email address is a known gap, sorry about that. For now if you want to use a different email you'll need to make a second account. We plan to make account merging possible in the future.

A short-sighted technical decision on my part: we use the Firebase Auth UIDs as our internal user IDs, but Firebase Auth does not allow you to have multiple email auth-providers on a single account. So we need to add a layer of indirection in our data model.

Also, I love the approach with close integration with mails - I think it is strange that the mail protocol isn't more widely used - having my own copies of the conversations, easily searchable and exportable, is a huge advantage!

Email is in some ways like a whole hidden social internet. A lot of people use email who have no interest in Twitter, Facebook, etc. And many of those people are really interesting. Radiopaper provides a way for them to have public conversations online without having to learn a new technology, and without having to worry about what might end up associated with their online presence in the absence of active management.

I share them with a political party that I disagree with, and it always irks when I am called by them.

Maybe I should create an account and check if there's a setting before I whine about it... but this is still the internet!

Isn't this the same thing as protecting your tweets and restricting who can tag you and reply to your tweets?

That kind of overtly obnoxious response is generally discouraged on HN.

I don’t think the over-friendliness would last as a phenomenon because frankly I got quickly bored reading replies like that, so I would expect the community to get over it and switch to trying to write good posts instead of performatively respectful ones.

How about I just not accept replies anyone but my whitelist, which I make based on their behaviour in general.

Advocate here. The Devil is my boss. Don't hate, please. But I'd like to mention...

So an idea isn't valid until the person being "challenged" signs off? That might mitigate trolling but there's also (likely) collateral damage. It could also accelerate (?) echo chambers.

What, off the top of my head, makes sense is sonething simalar to Google's image-based CAPTCHA. That is, does X idea make sense? Is it factual and correct?

Leaving the "challengee" in control feels subject to bias and "reverse trolling".

I'm certainly pro an alternative to the usual social media suspects, but people are going to be people. For better and for worse.

Is moderation reviewable? One issue with other platforms is you often cannot see what they have removed. On reddit they show you your removed comments as if they're not removed when you're logged in. This can lead to parties where everyone thinks their voice is heard all the time when in reality it's sometimes filtered.

The biggest trolls in this scenario are the mods. Secret removals can contribute to mods manipulating the conversation through what Peter Pomerantsev calls "consensus cracking" in his book "This Is Not Propaganda".

-Author of Reveddit

[1] https://radiopaper.com/conversation/46ERO4T8dF9hmx156gmm/0oV...

We'll also endeavor to block accounts from the platform that violate our policies (https://radiopaper.com/policies).

It's not at all clear to me how that premise is going to lead to more civil conversations, but I am 100% behind people trying out different online conversation mechanics and seeing what falls out of them.

Stack overflow, 4chan, twitter, every phpBB ever... the communities they developed were all heavily influenced by the mechanics of interacting with them. I strongly believe that there's plenty of solution space left to explore with the problem of "how do we design interaction mechanics to produce the community we want." I applaud anyone exploring that solution space!

One big thing I've been wanting from such a service is subscription to users I find interesting. Someone has posted a great insight? I add the user to my list and my daily email now includes whatever that user has posted yesterday. The email has links to unsubscribe from users. As a side effect, this breaks echo chambers: unusually motivated users won't be able to spam your subscriptions, and won't be able to ban you - the only ban is when others unsubscribe from you.

Also, is there a blog or some way to follow¹ development and know when new features roll out?

¹ Preferably via RSS!!

Most of them, you just sockpuppet around. Yes, you could enforce "real" identities, and that comes with a whole host of different problems.

I love you're experimenting in the space - we desperately need improvement. I just think you still have a few experiments ahead of you (and I hope some of them center on the idea of community instead of individual interactions)

There will never be a single platform that will satisfy everybody, because people are diverse and have different definitions of what it means to troll.

Ok, this is a really smart idea.

Can you just please add a link to your about page on your home page? without this posting, I never would have found it.

Mastodon let's you filter people and block them as well, and there are plenty of similar apps that provide actions to create and filter groups of conversations.

It's helpful feedback that this isn't as discoverable as it should be. If you hover your cursor towards the bottom of the explore page, some links show up.

1. It needs categories. I don't feel motivated to read most of the conversations but if those were related to my interest i definitely would.

2. users should be able to add some bios, who are these people.

3. where it says you can start a conversation there could be a list of experts in my category i can send the question to, not popular people but people who have posted a lot in that category. this can be quora without the spam!

1. We're certainly looking into this, and other approaches to content discovery.

2. You can already add bios! Go to to your user page (link in the top-right), and it should be clear how to add a bio.

3. Thanks for the suggestion, we'll definitely think about this more.

IIRC Discourse started without categories. The whole "bucket of messages" shebang. It did not go well, in the sense that I believe people kept asking for categories.

There's something special about a curated list of folders to slot messages into, that tags and labels don't quite capture.

I prefer to look at it as "each person is interested in different things, and they mostly don't overlap with any other one person, statistically".

I think the previews on the thumbnails shouldn't be the beginning of the message. My reason is that it oftentimes contains longwinded introductions and I believe there could be more compelling text. Maybe that's just my impression, but I think one workaround is to use some "AI logic" to automatically summarize the thread. Just Duck Duck Go to "text summarization apis" and see.

You could, for example, say that you could compete on other feature sets, but the same argument applies.

Reply-by-email? NodeBB has this (via SendGrid) and probably Discourse too.

Extensibility? Lots of forums support plugins.

Theming? Many forums are very customisable (or at least themeable)

If your differentiating factor is something that is simple (and even mind blowing), it's especially easy for it to be stolen.

I went with a very different design approach - a bit more slapstick; referencing the messaging apps we are all familiar with.

If so, how does the obligation that there is a reply before publishing, prevent trolling?

The problem with trolls seems to be that they are very difficult to ignore.