6 ms·

I merely outlined what I would want if I was a moderator. I would rather receive email with statistical analysis than be compared to Hitler and Stalin without a

by memexy 6y ago

I merely outlined what I would want if I was a moderator. I would rather receive email with statistical analysis than be compared to Hitler and Stalin without any data to back it up. It would be way funnier if someone proved statistically that I was Hitler and Stalin at the same time. They'd have to go through a lot of trouble to actually do that and if they managed to do so then that would be some high art. Any complaint without data to back it up would be thrown in the trash pile. In any case. It's a worthwhile experiment to try because it can't make your life worse. I can't really imagine anything worse than being compared to Hitler and Stalin especially if all that person is doing is just venting their anger. I'd want to avoid being the target of that anger and I would require mathematical analysis from anyone that claimed to be justifiably angry to show the actual justification for their anger. Without data you will continue to get hate mail that's nothing more than people making up a story to justify their own anger. And you have already noticed the personal narrative angle so I'm not telling you anything new here. The data takes away the "personal" part of the narrative which I think is an improvement.

dang 6y ago
Alas, there's no way to avoid being the target of that anger. It's inevitable in the system. You're right that one has to develop strategies for managing one's reaction to it. I don't think requiring a mathematical analysis would work in my case. It might not work in any case; I expect most angry people would probably get angrier if told that their anger is invalid because not backed up mathematically, and the dynamics of escalating mass anger could end up destroying the whole system. There's a deeper issue though. Such an analysis would depend on labeling the data accurately in the first place, and opposing sides would never agree on how to label it. Indeed, they would adjust the labels until the analysis produced what they already 'know' to be the right answer—not because of conscious fraud but simply because the situation seems so obvious to them to begin with. As I said above, the only people motivated enough to work on this would be ones who would never accept any result that didn't reproduce what they already know, or feel they know.
- holler 6y ago
  Hey dang, first, I appreciate all of your comments in this post and your deep commitment to both HN and the state of online discussion. I'm learning a lot from reading your comments. I'm curious if given all that you've shared, you think it's even _possible_ to scale a "healthy" discussion site any larger than HN currently is? It's clear that HN's success is in no small part due to the commitment, passion, and active participation of the few moderators. Contrast that with some of the top comments, which describe how toxic Twitter is, and I wonder if there's some sort of limit to effective moderation, or if we just haven't found more scalable solutions to manage millions of humans talking openly online sans toxicity? cheers
  - NateEag 6y ago
    I'm not dang, obviously, but I think it's a testament to his hard work that HN functions even as well as it does. Most sites its size are far, far worse, I think. I personally believe that is due to human nature. I think that is what dang has observed and is trying to articulate - no matter how smart or rigorous or mathematical you are, you still are human and thus subject to the human condition. One way that manifests is this persuasion that the Other is winning the war (and that there is a war, for that matter). I take it as almost axiomatic that a site with Twitter's volume cannot be anything but the cesspool it is. It's too big for a single person to even begin to read a statistically-significant fraction of the content. That means moderation is a hilariously-stupid concept at that scale. Any team of moderators large enough to do the job will itself suffer the fragmentation and conflicts that online forums do, and find itself unable to agree on what the policies should be, let alone how they should be adapted in contentious cases (and by definition, you only need moderation in contentious cases).
    - dang 6y ago
      I agree with a lot of this, but the things you're talking about already apply to HN, so the argument can't really be used to show that a larger site would necessarily fail to work as well as HN (however 'well' that really is—I'm not making any grand claims here). For example, the human nature you're talking about is by far the strongest force on HN, and the scale (though tiny compared to Twitter or Facebook or Reddit) is already beyond what one would suppose possible for a forum like this.

by memexy 6y ago

dang 6y ago

Alas, there's no way to avoid being the target of that anger. It's inevitable in the system. You're right that one has to develop strategies for managing one's reaction to it. I don't think requiring a mathematical analysis would work in my case. It might not work in any case; I expect most angry people would probably get angrier if told that their anger is invalid because not backed up mathematically, and the dynamics of escalating mass anger could end up destroying the whole system. There's a deeper issue though. Such an analysis would depend on labeling the data accurately in the first place, and opposing sides would never agree on how to label it. Indeed, they would adjust the labels until the analysis produced what they already 'know' to be the right answer—not because of conscious fraud but simply because the situation seems so obvious to them to begin with. As I said above, the only people motivated enough to work on this would be ones who would never accept any result that didn't reproduce what they already know, or feel they know.

holler 6y ago
Hey dang, first, I appreciate all of your comments in this post and your deep commitment to both HN and the state of online discussion. I'm learning a lot from reading your comments. I'm curious if given all that you've shared, you think it's even _possible_ to scale a "healthy" discussion site any larger than HN currently is? It's clear that HN's success is in no small part due to the commitment, passion, and active participation of the few moderators. Contrast that with some of the top comments, which describe how toxic Twitter is, and I wonder if there's some sort of limit to effective moderation, or if we just haven't found more scalable solutions to manage millions of humans talking openly online sans toxicity? cheers
- NateEag 6y ago
  I'm not dang, obviously, but I think it's a testament to his hard work that HN functions even as well as it does. Most sites its size are far, far worse, I think. I personally believe that is due to human nature. I think that is what dang has observed and is trying to articulate - no matter how smart or rigorous or mathematical you are, you still are human and thus subject to the human condition. One way that manifests is this persuasion that the Other is winning the war (and that there is a war, for that matter). I take it as almost axiomatic that a site with Twitter's volume cannot be anything but the cesspool it is. It's too big for a single person to even begin to read a statistically-significant fraction of the content. That means moderation is a hilariously-stupid concept at that scale. Any team of moderators large enough to do the job will itself suffer the fragmentation and conflicts that online forums do, and find itself unable to agree on what the policies should be, let alone how they should be adapted in contentious cases (and by definition, you only need moderation in contentious cases).
  - dang 6y ago
    I agree with a lot of this, but the things you're talking about already apply to HN, so the argument can't really be used to show that a larger site would necessarily fail to work as well as HN (however 'well' that really is—I'm not making any grand claims here). For example, the human nature you're talking about is by far the strongest force on HN, and the scale (though tiny compared to Twitter or Facebook or Reddit) is already beyond what one would suppose possible for a forum like this.