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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

I agree with all of your points except for anonymity. Some of the most toxic internet battles I’ve seen were on Facebook, where everyone was using their real name, picture, etc. On the other hand, some of the most insightful discussions I’ve participated in were right here on Hacker News.

So I think there’s another explanatory variable in this case. What’s the big difference between HN and Facebook? HN is a self-selected community of people which has established a culture based on strong values of discussion, charity, mutual respect, and highly engaged moderation. Facebook, on the other hand, has only outsourced moderation in order to keep out illegal material. It doesn’t have any interest whatsoever in promoting healthy, engaging discussions.

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I think people really tend to undervalue good moderation and related systems for shaping good discussion. It's extremely common on HN to see people write off all moderation as censorship and an absolute bad, but then it's really interesting to see that so many people repeatedly pick the very-moderated HN over places like 4chan. It's like fish, ignorant of water, proposing that it's universally true that decreasing the obstacles and material between each other improves the discourse, while ignoring that places like that do exist and largely lack that benefit.

I think it's possible to have good discussion on places that are very loosely moderated, but it's not as simple. And I don't think it can work on sites like 4chan where user have no identity

> but then it's really interesting to see that so many people repeatedly pick the very-moderated HN over places like 4chan.

Do they? HN seems small compared to 4chan and tiny compared to Facebook.

I’d say more than three quarters of my tech friends have never been on HN whereas they have all been on Facebook at one point.

Oh I wasn't trying to make a relative comparison, just pointing out that there are a lot of people here who repeatedly choose HN over 4chan.

It has to do with culture. Take traffic precautions. People stop speeding when you place speedbumps. You might need those speedbumps for 5% of traffic users, but it useful. Nobody has claimed that there is a speed dictatorship.

The same goes with moderation. You create a culture where you allow everyone there say, and add specific speedbumps (rules) where your community needs it. Otherwise you get the 5% that overruns the place, skewing the discussion disproportionately.

Source : was moderator for 5 years (not here)

Is HN "very-moderated" though? I've got my share of unpopular opinions but nobody has ever tried to shut me down over them - something that I've seen happen to myself and others relatively frequently on IRC.

Sounds like a good moderation. Why would you want to shut down unpopular opinion.

> highly engaged moderation

This in particular. It took me a very long time to recognize how important this was, but looking back the very best social spaces I've ever been in have all had reasonable standards of moderation with moderators who actually paid attention to the various conversations going on. That's not to say that all spaces with moderation standards are good, but I can't think of a worthwhile social network with hands-off or primarily user-driven moderation.

Trouble is, we haven't figured out a way to scale "good moderation" up to something like Facebook scale, and organizing a mass exodus from large social space is a lot harder to do en mass unless you have a Digg v4-scale unforced error.

A karma system and/or paid accounts, which will discourage people from breaking the rules (because they now have something tangible to lose, either their high-karma account or the money they paid for it).

The karma system can also reduce the amount of content needed to moderate because low-karma users will be limited by the system (to limit the potential damage from a fresh malicious account) while the high-karma users are more or less trusted because they have much to lose by breaking the rules.

People tend to downvote posts with opinions they don't like. So eventually there'll be only one opinion in a given community. I saw it happening more than once.

On a good account, downvotes for unpopular opinions would still be balanced with upvotes from the popular opinions. I often post stuff that goes against the mainstream in here and my karma is still good despite taking the occasional hit.

I agree that the system isn't perfect (it would fail if you only post unpopular - but otherwise valid and within the rules - opinions), but wouldn't it still be better than the current situation?

> A karma system

Upvoting and downvoting can and have been gamed by users and groups of users. It's a fine distraction to drive engagement in a social media space, but you cannot delegate moderation to the crowd without it turning into hot mess.

> and/or paid accounts.

At some point this might have been a good idea, but it doesn't stop bad actors from joining or returning through credit card fraud.

- - -

Have you looked at tildes? It's a reddit/HN-style site, but with stronger moderation and no downvote button. But the most interesting feature is that you have to be invited to the site by somebody, and the chain of invites is tracked, so if there are a bunch of troublemakers that all seem to have a root at one individual, the moderators can get rid of the whole tree if need-be.

> it doesn't stop bad actors from joining or returning through credit card fraud.

It still raises the barrier to entry significantly. Stolen credit cards are not free to obtain, either you buy them off someone else for $$$ or you obtain them for free through your own means but then you're losing $$$ by wasting them on spam accounts instead of selling them for actual money.

Trouble is, we haven't figured out a way to scale "good moderation"

I’m not so sure we need it. Isn’t it okay if we have different, small communities with different interests? Like I’m not sure if society actually needs a community as large as Facebook.

Sure, Zuck believes in it, but I think he’s somewhat naïve for doing so. Different people need different spaces.

Good point. This is good then, we don't have to give up anonymity to be decent and we, the HN community, are a living example of that.

What if any social media platform is required, by law, to put up a banner and 20 minute delay before their voices are broadcasted. The banner indicates, just like Cigarette box warnings, "Please be courteous, introspect and assess your comments before posting it. Be be a decent human, talk about issues and not other people, and have a productive objective conversation." and allow people to edit their posts for 20 mins. This would be opposed by the shareholders so it needs to be a law and cannot be left up to the companies to do it as it reduces engagement and consequently ad-revenue.

It also would be nice to have @dang x 1,000,000 to do moderation on the internet scale. Honest, decent and positive "internet social workers". It would be a well paid job.

@dang does a pretty damn good job, and I'm surprised I don't see a lot more negatives about him 'censoring' things. Yet people even on hackernews blow a gasket at any censorship on fb, reddit, or twitter... I guess maybe because here is more topical and censoring is to keep things on-topic so they 'allow' that kind of censoring?

That's a good question. Lets say that we're mostly ok with the manifestation of moderation acted out by dang et al here at HN, and less positive about the moderation in other places like FB/reddit.

Given that as a backdrop, how would you characterize the important variables that affect the relative perception of these moderation approaches?

I'll start: 1. Well articulated rules/ethic. 2. Transparent moderation actions. 3. Few "hard lines": dang may step in to remind people of the rules as they approach the line. The precedence of rules is flexible and depends on the context.

4. The person interpreting the context and bending the flexible rules is good at perceiving the intangible essence of virtue.

5. There is a way to get in touch with the moderators, appeal any censorship and have a civil conversation to clarify any misunderstandings. Just like the good old forums in fact, where moderation was benevolent and tried its best to resolve issues.

Compare that to mainstream social media where moderation is a cost center, outsourced to people in atrocious working conditions with no good understanding of the subtleties of the language at hand or the topic being discussed, and has no incentive to make the platform better. The platform itself has no incentive to encourage good discussions and mediate conflicts, its only incentive is to keep people looking at ads and the mediocre moderation is just there to keep the law at bay. Any "good discussions" that arise anyway are just a side-effect.

The other day I when I saw different people were criticizing @dang alternatively for being a communist and a racist nazi, I knew he did a great job.

was thinking the same thing for the past few days! not going to rehash all that is going on, but, i came to realize that we needed good moderation on social medias. we needed it a long time ago.

now we blame the "cancel culture" because some are going into other's social media past to dig out stuff. but here's the thing. i saw most of these platforms grow. there were no good moderation.

instead ignorance and absurdity were often supported and even rewarded!

we wouldn't be here if good moderation had happened. now, we are struggling with who to hold accountable for the missed opportunity for moderating what went on social media. the damage is done.

we needed more moderation like we have here on HN!

Yeah, it's much harder to feel like you're being oppressed if you aren't being told your views are evil or stupid, but are instead being told that they're not relevant to the topic at hand. The lack of people posting views opposed to yours also means way less potential triggers for you to post your political views, which means things never spiral out of hand in the first place.

The problem is that people sometimes want to be nasty, hurtful or obtuse. This warning will not do anything because 1) people explicitly want to be noxious and 2) there is no consequence for breaking the rules anyway.

> I agree with all of your points except for anonymity.

I think the result is well-identified but not the cause:

> This creates extremely unproductive conversations without consequences. Platforms such as Twitter propel this behavior to new heights. When it was local, you'd lose friends for being unpleasant, you'd lose credibility in your community for being inflammatory.

In real life, if you accidentally invite a local Karen to your party, they show up and screech at everyone and don't get invited again. Karen is thereafter stuck at home alone screeching at her cats. Problem solved.

On the internet, the local Karen screeches and other Karens from all over the world retweet it. Karen is thereby emboldened by the attention and joins a roving band of Karens who blanket the world in screeching and hatred like a plague of angry locusts. Which can happen even if Karen is her real name.

What prevents this in real life isn't the lack of anonymity/pseudonymity, it's the lack of equally deranged local compatriots providing a support network and validation for ridiculous anti-social behavior.

Presumably what's needed is more localized communities. It shouldn't be Twitter and Facebook but rather separate communities based on interests or locality and moderated by people who are themselves members of the community being moderated rather than some unaccountable corporate monopolist.