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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

I wish that Twitter - or some other social network - would experiment with the type of moderation seen on HN. Some would maybe call it heavy handed but I think of HN as a place that is mercifully relatively free of trolling, outrage culture, political bullshit and other toxic behaviors.

In my experience there's no place like HN on the internet, and that's due I suspect to having a highly professional moderator (@dang) who uses top level communication skills to firmly but politely pull people into line.

That in turn creates a virtuous circle where users socially moderate each other.

It's hard to describe just how relaxing and pleasant it is browsing HN. It's always jarring to read the comments on e.g some Facebook groups I belong to, which feel like they're authored by a bunch of teenagers that have just found the key to their parents liquor cabinet.

If Twitter was like HN I would spend time there.

View on HN

HN still suffers from what I call the "Everyone is an idiot but me" mentality. There is also a bit of outrage from time to time about small things. But the fact that it is the worst that happens here is saying a lot though. HN really is very well moderated and the guidelines are concise, reasonable, and simple to understand. It really helps that HN has a narrow set of topics. No idea how this could possibly scale to the size of twitter.

HN doesn't scale because at the end of the day we can fall back to tech and moderate everything else out of existence.

Politics poof gone.

Celebrities poof gone.

Sports poof gone.

Religion poof gone.

HN simply doesn't have to deal with the above in a general manner which removes a massive number of issues.

Certainly as soon as you move away from talking about programming there aer a bunch of people here who talk like they're experts but are absolutely incorrect. Which is a worry because I only notice it for things I already know about (process engineering and railway design/operation).

>"Everyone is an idiot but me" mentality

That is not unique to HN. That is all social media.

I like HN and the moderators, but this isn't how HN mods imo. People aren't just politely reprimanded and falling into line...

People get accounts banned every day here. Moderation on HN is imo heavier than it is on twitter. Topics and discussion are heavily controlled and removed if they become at all sensitive or aggressive. You can't call people names or make crass offtopic jokes (like people on twitter do constantly).

Moderation is quick and personal, but that doesn't scale to a site with the volume of twitter.

> You can't call people names or make crass offtopic jokes (like people on twitter do constantly).

I'm not sure how they could pull it off, but if Twitter wants to be a real town hall for the world then these are the things that DO need to be removed.

But if twitter wants to be the place were anyone can scream into the void, then they can't do this.

The weird thing is, I want both. My favorite part of twitter is both of these things.

> I'm not sure how they could pull it off, but if Twitter wants to be a real town hall for the world then these are the things that DO need to be removed.

I don't think you can be a town hall for the world. There are too many differences between societies, communities, and factions across such a large number of people. Sufficient context is difficult to impossible to establish if you have to include both your neighbor and someone from Austria in your audience. Doing so in 280 characters is impossible. So every conversation devolves to the lowest coming denominator - whether that's nastiness or having to write a tons of disclaimers before saying something for fear of older tweets coming back to bite you.

The reason HN or smaller fora work is because they can maintain their own community with certain expectations and established context while aggressively banning anyone who doesn't fall in line. How do you do that on a site as large as Twitter with any sort of consistency, especially across language boundaries?

I honestly don’t understand the consistent (self) praise for HN comments. Perhaps the mods make valiant efforts to enforce some vague standard of decorum and it would be worse without that thankless work, but any topic that doesn’t lend itself to software industry anecdote sharing is filled with the same vacuous, uninformed polemic as any other generalist social media site, just with a thin veneer of politeness. And even that supposed politeness is missing if I happen to open the comments section at the wrong time (presumably before a mod could clean them up, but isn’t that enough of a sign it doesn’t scale particularly well?)

You have a much different experience on general social media sites than I do. When I open a twitter thread that isn't sandboxed to nerds geeking out with other nerds about cool stuff, half the stuff I see is flamebait or just nasty adhominem vitriol. But, I think it just goes with the territory, if HN was a place for politics/culture wars/etc. it would probably devolve into the filth despite Dang's best efforts. This and stackoverflow are the only sites that I actively want to read comments, instead of mindlessly scrolling down to them and regretting it.

Agreed. HN is one my fave places for hardly strictly tech discourse. But its commenters have that unfortunate undying love for the American Democratic Party where any purely factual dissent is thumbed down with no explanation. I'm personally "far left" (more accurately: believe what the mainstream American wants from their govt) and twice I mentioned something negative about some MSDNC person and got negative a million points.

Other than that, I learn a lot every day from y'alls!

That might be it - I’m just using the “saner” parts of the Internet as my reference (at least compared to Politics On Twitter), which usually means “smaller scope of community and discussion / human moderation”, much like HN on a good day. So HN wouldn’t feel special in that light.

Too true -- as topics get less technological and more political, comments here become increasingly naive without any corresponding reduction in certainty.

The problem I see with that is that it doesn't scale to the size Twitter is.

HN works because it exists to talk about tech and startup topics. Every time the topics veer off that course, the threads turn into dumpster fires EVEN THOUGH everyone is well aware that moderation is fairly strict. For something like twitter? That's impossible.

The HN community is filled with a bunch of geeky, technical know-it-alls... but I probably wouldn't have it any other way.

The moderation and thoughtful approach to community is undoubtedly the best I have seen on the Internet.

It's not for everyone, but it is for me, which is why I refresh the page more times than any other page during the course of the day.

I can't imagine another community that isn't specialist getting close to be honest.

But I would love it if the rest of the Internet were as intellectually curious - this is the core of HN.

Twitter is more of a platform imo, that has to have more permissive policies than a niche forum like HN. Benevolent dictatorships (especially opt-in ones) are great for smaller discussions. And people literally can go have their own discussion about celebrity gossip or whatever that would get killed on HN, in another forum.

Twitter is more like a utility, and if it wants to occupy that position it should be more open to content that people disagree with or don't like.

HN is a small and uniform community, twitter is basically a group messenger -- I don't think it'd be reasonable to try to apply the same standards.

(dang does do a great job, and it's really remarkable how well HN has maintained its quality over many years. That it is not a commericial enterprise also helps a lot, I think.)

dang, if you're reading this, what's your motivation? It seems like a lot of work and somewhat thankless.

HN is pretty much like any subreddit. And there is a line of prevailing thought that you can't go against.

I guess it depends on the subreddit and mods, but most subreddits I've been to are littered with jokes, memes, and various levels of anger. They are usually hilarious but not what I want to wade through most of the time. It hides the useful info.

Eh, I think not showing 'downvotes' really helps. Reddit really has a confirmation bias when it comes to upvotes/downvotes so its harder to get inertia to downvote dump on someone.

What’s the prevailing thought you can’t go against here? I tend to be a right-leaning libertarian, but am liberal on some issues. I see conservative comments. I see liberal comments. I see plenty of “Something bad happened? That’s because of capitalism” comments. I see plenty of pro-capitalist comments. It seems to me that the moderation here is pretty balanced.

I think a lot of it has to do with the topics that are allowed here. We don't have politics (and in the rare cases we do it often devolves into name calling) and we don't have a lot of other controversial topics.

The most controversial topic here is emacs vs vi.

Yup. Twitter moderation policy could just be Dang. And we’d be fine.

terrible idea, HN moderates tone too much.

You can’t clone dang (yet).

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