This article does seem to get at the essence of HN, appreciative of dang and sctb's humanity while not ignoring the problems. Personally, I would actually consider it an excellent demonstration of the fallibility of one of HN's favourite tropes, Gell-Mann amnesia.
If there's one critique that I believe is paramount it's that HN has, due to its readership, an ethical obligation that goes beyond making discussions all nice and civil.
Political issues are obviously divisive and it's perfectly fine to keep stuff like the El Paso massacre of the front page. But when hot-button issues intersect with technology, the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility.
Yes, articles about, for example, discriminatory ML do often make it to the front page. But in my impression, that topic (as well as employment discrimination, culture-wars-adjacent scandals in tech academia etc) are far more likely to be quickly flagged into oblivion than similarly political takes that just happen to be in line with HN's prevailing attitude (e.g. cloudflare-shouldnt-ban-<x>).
The article impressively articulates what toll divisiveness takes on the moderators: Even if I read the same ugly comments, I am unlikely to experience the sharpness of emotion that apparently comes with considering the community one's baby, and making it's failures one's own. When such divisiveness is then reflected in the "real world" of mass media, the pressure only increases.
But as this article shows, abdicating the responsibility by keeping the topics sterile is similarly suspect, in the sense of fiddling while Rome burns. I believe a willingness to confront the ugly sides of technology with some courage of conviction would eventually be recognised, even if it may occasionally involve a bit of a mess.
Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats. (Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.)
Could you clarify why you thought this? What evidence do you have that supports this? The big thread shows that the top comment agrees that 8chan should be left alone. [0] and the comment chain shows that there seems to be something like a significant minority against 8chan, but it doesn’t appear to be a prevailing majority.
>Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats.
Those threads wouldn't have passed the thousand comment mark if HN had anything close to a prevailing attitude on the matter. As with many contentious issues, people tend to believe HN is unilaterally biased against them, sometimes to the point of that bias being enforced by the moderators.
>Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.
8Chan and its contingent of neo-nazis were free to communicate as they wished until the site started to become a cultural nexus for racially motivated mass shootings in the US. I don't think deplatforming them was unwarranted. They have the right to their views, but not the right to force any establishment to host those views, even when people start dying over them.
Also, there are still plenty of places on the internet for such people to congregate and communicate. They can start a private Discord server and post manifestos from the race war there if they want.
... the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility.
What kind of power do you think we have? We can't even convince our friends and family to stay the fuck off of Facebook. Aside from the fact that some people from our industry have a shitton of money I don't see us having any kind of social influence.
Not having power, or having less power than before, makes the discourse even more important.
> We can't even convince our friends and family to stay the fuck off of Facebook.
The idea that people should stay off Facebook is part of that narrative. That is how the industry can claim that they are changing the world, but at the same time aren't to answer for any of the changes.
> Aside from the fact that some people from our industry have a shitton of money I don't see us having any kind of social influence.
Social influence isn't so much what is said and done in isolation, but what is and isn't accepted. Things like what you see as a problem, why it is a problem and how it should be addressed influences what happens next.
Shout out to dang! You're doing a great job! Thank you!
Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. I wish good moderation was a skill that more people learned - would you ever be interested in writing a guide or teaching a class on moderation?
I've been waiting for an excuse to compliment the mods here, without it being off-topic. They do a great job! Of course, it also helps that the community here is more reasonable than most.
> Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet
Not at all. It's rather the community that makes it a reasonable discussion space. Most people here understand that this is not Reddit and that proper answers are needed when you interact with other members. Of course moderation is useful and necessary in certain cases, but it's certainly far from being the key factor here.
I highly doubt "2 moderators" would be able to do anything if half of the community was composed of trolls. The fact that trolls are very few in the first place, and not welcome by other members who flag them and downvote them to hell, make it possible for it to work even with a low level of moderation.
I wouldn’t call it strict at all. He’s actually way more liberal about stuff than most over-bearing Reddit mods who think it’s their job to be editors of their own private newspaper rather than helping only when there’s no other option.
This is why dang is so good at what he does as it draws a difficult balance.
I'm of the opinion that it is best to err on the side of strictness. Once you make a reasonable exception, you open a precedent, and some people are very good at digging up and pointing out precedent.
There should be some fuzziness about decisions otherwise you encourage gaming to see what can just get past censors. It sounds unreasonable but it works well in practice.
> and some people are very good at digging up and pointing out precedent.
As one of the people who loves being that guy in another community: They're not only very good at digging up and pointing out precedents, they likely have systematic archives of everything that remotely relates to the decisions they wish to see made.
The guidelines of the site I think are the ultimate precedent. If Dang dont get ya the rest of the community likely will. HN is somewhat self-moderating after all. I have seen users point out to abuses of the community guidelines.
I feel like sometimes users with negative Karma like crazy become even more obvious to mods. Sidenote: I still yearn to see what HN looks like to mods and what not. Not to cheat the system but to understand the system more (I love knowing these sorts of hidden details).
(In your HN settings, you'll see there's the ability to see deleted posts and shadowbanned users, and if you turn that on you'll see that most posts have a load a crazy people and trolls posting on them that the mods have cleaned up.)
I think the HN culture is slowly dying. Reflexive downvoting has become very common as of late, the eternal September is brining in more people steeped in political hivemindedness. That isn’t to say all is lost, but this site feels markedly different from the beginning of the decade.
I would argue that HN culture is evolving within the culture it exists in. I don't recall the beginning of the decade having so many intersections of tech and everyday life. In the beginning of the decade, Google wasn't known to have paid off high level employees for sexual harassment, Facebook wasn't known to have hordes of contractors watching horrible stuff for their job, no one knew the good and bad effects of the 'gig economy' yet, etc.
That is to say, I don't recall the beginning of the decade tech and politics to be so intertwined due to how tech has become more and more a part of people's lives.
I am afraid you are correct. As popularity rises, degredation of discussions(and never-ending o-t tangents) increase. A write-up of the quality mods in the New Yorker will not change that tide, IMO.
It's not "goodbye" yet, but nevertheless, thanks for all the fish, Dang!
Definitely the members IMO; a moderator can snipe out the occasional troll, but if all members are being pricks there's nothing that can be done about that. What you need is to maintain an atmosphere, a culture, etc. You need the community to call one another out and keep one another accountable. And you need to nip any broken windows in the bud - Reddit's comment threads often spiral out of control and into a spammy mess of memes and references for example, simply because that's part of their culture. It's harmless enough on Reddit, but if that happened on HN the comments section would diminish greatly in value.
I don't consider the moderation on this site to be strict at all?
It's tone police more than it is content police. HN continually lets comments and statements go completely unquestioned, and in some cases actively supports view points, that are objectively wrong in the most vanilla fashion all because it was said in the correct manner.
I don't know what you mean by "suspicious." I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts. The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all.
I mean that, maybe you should distrust your own judgement that "HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". Perhaps other places have environments that you don't like but other people feel that they are "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet".
> I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts.
In my experience this has a lot more to do with algorithmic instead of chronological ordering. Facebook for example, where a lot of communities have gone to die, is a context-destroying engine. Only memes and shitposts can survive. What is the point of writing something thoughtful if you don't know if anyone will even see it?
Otherwise, online communities have a lifetime. Before HN there was Slashdot and Kuro5hin. They were nice at some point, then devolved into shit. Same thing will happen to HN and everything else, of course.
> The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all.
My favorite community uses a completely different strategy: there are no moderators but it is relatively obscure. Shit posters come and go, nobody reacts, all is fine. It has been going on for more than two decades. I will not disclose it because I do not want to ruin it, but I bet lots of things like this exist. They don't make money nor are they advertising arms of money-making operations, so nobody really cares. No newspaper will ever write an editorial about them -- this is why they are so great!
I'm sure there are plenty of reasonable discussion forums, mailing lists, etc. And the more gated and the more obscure they are, the more reasonable (and insular) they are.
Reddit is actually pretty great. It's easy enough to evade the more-less-desireable parts of it. I can assure you some of the best textually-based content the last X years have happened there.
I agree. Unfortunately, I have the impression it is already going in the downwards trajectory. The new redesign contains all the red flags. When "old.reddit.com" stops working, I suspect it's over for me.
I've been enjoying the "Against the Rules" podcast [1] hosted by Michael Lewis [2]. It's related to moderation so I'll post it here.
The show is series of stories/reports on the work of refereeing fairness in different parts of life. With views into how those referees are changing, and in some cases, outright disappearing.
Fascinating stuff from an author who really knows how to tell an engaging story about a potentially dry topic. (Moneyball, The Big Short, Liar's Poker, etc.)
Thanks to Dan and Scott for their moderation, and whilst the article highlights some of negative aspects of discussion on HN, I for one keep coming here because it's still on average the most reasoned and thought provoking part of the internet I'm aware of - so, thanks to you all for your positive contributions :)
Amidst all the ambient craziness of our ever-changing world, I raise a glass to Hacker News, the team who moderate it and to all who wish to make it a community driven by erudite discussions :)
Very interesting article :-) I had no idea that the community is this large and that there are only two moderators.
The article could have explained the other part of the moderation better - the user moderation provided by up and down votes. Bad comments are not only flagged but also tend to be pushed further down the page towards oblivion, while better comments tend to be lifted up towards the top of the page.
Anyways, King Canute: He was Danish, not Swedish :-)
I’ve always thought HN is so relatively pleasant because of the investment it puts into quality moderation. But reading this profile really underscored how different things would be had two other people, of different temperaments and perspectives on life, been selected as mods. I imagined the mods to stereotypically be, at oldest, late-20s techies in SV. But it makes sense in retrospect one is in his mid-30s, and one is old enough to have 2 children of his own.
Joking aside, if there were to be forum awards, Hacker News would top it all the time. Best moderated, high level, most interesting discussion forum award goes to ...
"Gackle replied. “We can’t stop that any more than King Canute”—the ancient Swedish king who demonstrated the limits of his power by trying, in an ironic spirit, to command the sea—“could stop the waves.""
Canute was King of England, Denmark and Norway. He was not Swedish. I think that The Newyorker is trolling Hacker News by dropping this quote in.
> “There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work.“
Software might be eating the world, I don't think people will eat software anytime soon.
It's a good reminder that we can't solve all problems by just throwing some code at it. Unfortunately ...
Really surprising to see that comment, which, full disclosure, I agree with, get flag-killed. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it get a few downvotes. But rarely have I ever seen a thorough, well-sourced, and civil comment actually be flag-killed. If anything, the shallow replies to his comment are the type of things that typically seem to get downvoted (though not necessarily flagged either).
I think this is a side effect of self-moderation. By making everyone in the community (over a certain threshold of participation) a mini-mod you turn rules enforcement into a popularity contest. Valid, interesting, yet unpopular points get suppressed. Rules violations that are popular get ignored, and sometimes even lauded.
There is no reason, based on the HN guidelines, that the referenced post should have been downvoted, let alone flagged. Whoever did so abused their power to make such decisions.
It happens all the time. Constantly and consistently. If you go against any kind of socially conservative or libertarian perspective it will get down voted and very likely flagged. It's always been this way.
You cannot discuss things in an actual academic manner on this forum. It is a tech enthusiast forum that happens to have a lot of money surrounding it.
I'm relatively new (this year) to HN, but it has quickly become my favorite site for news (and tech news). While part of the reason for this is the clean, non-commercialized interface, the primary reason I frequent this site is the expert commentary on posts.
> On any given day, its top links might include a Medium post about technical hiring
Isn't it quite ironic to see the article suggesting that HN top link might include Medium post. I've usually read not-so-positive feedback about Medium posts. Isn't it the case?
Medium has good content behind an increasingly infuriating presentation. Mechanically it's the opposite of HN, but for various reasons (reach, possibility of reimbursment) people do write some quality content there.
When you're looking at a page of 30 links, the signaling value of a domain is useful. Medium is a low-barrier place to publish, and has discovery built in, so it ends up attracting a lot of bad writing and promotional material. That, combined with the degraded reading experience, is why I am happy to judge a book by its cover in this case.
Since anyone can write for medium, and anyone with an HN account can post medium links here, there are huge amounts of medium content. So we see a lot of that 90%, as well as the 10% that's useful.
>Then my eyes moved down the thread, where a third user had left a new comment. It read: “King Canute was supposed to stop the tide, you couch alluder.”
It seems to me that comment is a joke. Playfully nitpicking word choice while putting in a bit of banter. But the article seems to be taking the comment as a serious argument/insult.
Skipping from thread to thread felt a bit like arriving at a party where half the room was sipping non-alcoholic shrubs and the other half had spent the afternoon tailgating in a stadium parking lot.
The "Show HN: This upvotes itself" came to mind. :)
But regarding the article: I don't think HN is getting worse. But why it might look like it is is that it has become a very very busy site - which makes it seem hectic and thus might appear "worse".
> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness.
I recently started contributing on another online community, a Slack, and I've found the rhetorical habits I've unwittingly cultivated creating a weird sort of mood. Nothing I'm saying is wrong, but HN has managed to make me somewhat oblivious to tone.
It's exactly as she describes, 'reckless'. I dare to go places that will rile people up. The silence that met my initial posts was deafening.
I initially wanted to retreat back to my familiar communities, Quora, HN. But I've never backed down from this kind of challenge before and I'm not about to now. I'm slowly managing to discover better 'hygiene' so I can fit better into this particular community of wonderful people.
But I wouldn't give back my participation in HN for anything. More than any other place I've ever found, HN makes me feel like I belong.
I may be misinterpreting what you're saying, but just in case: the critique isn't about "style", as in being too direct or offensive or anything like that. It's about the value system, and about how arguments are evaluated.
The ensuing discussion is entirely obsessed with the legalistic details of India's action: what sort of law is it/who has the authority to recind it/etc.
Read any news report on the topic and those questions are secondary to the intentions and actual effects of the policy, i. e. "is this intended to allow resettling a majority-muslim province with Hindus and thereby dilute it's culture as part of a nationalistic campaign?"
That sort of superficial legalism is rather prevalent. Any discussion of a public protest will include some people complaining about protesters not staying on the sidewalks. Discussions on law frequently find really clever "cheats" relying on too-literal a reading of the text ("Freedom of 'Speech', not of 'Writing', the New York Times doesn't have a case").
If I were to over-psychoanalyse, this approach seems to gell with a certain type of uber-rationality that denies the value of anything that cannot be measured. Hence, I've seen repeated suggestions that web fonts shouldn't exist because nobody needs more than one readable font or, more generally, that "design" is superfluous wastefulness at best and often akin to lying.
> It's about the value system, and about how arguments are evaluated.
Sure, that critique is all over the piece, and quite valid. So valid that calling attention to it again feels like beating a dead horse.
It was the 'performative erudition' part I wanted to share my experience with. HN has changed the way that I communicate and think, in ways that I couldn't put a finger on until I started reading the article. It's changed how I come across at work, how I interact with my friends and family.
> Hence, I've seen repeated suggestions that web fonts shouldn't exist because nobody needs more than one readable font or, more generally, that "design" is superfluous wastefulness at best and often akin to lying.
Why do people insist on things being pretty? Obviously they're overcompensating for deficiencies in some other area. I'll stop now before you start thinking I'm serious.
>For decades, the phrase “Eternal September” has been used to describe the tipping point for a message board or online community—the inclusion, or invasion, of new users who dramatically change the existing subculture.
Millions of readers, the amount of active commenters is much lower.
In addition, HN doesn't get much of the "classic" troll crowd (no matter if 4chan/8chan/outright real Nazis/gamergate) or Trump supporters - from the occasional politics thread aside, there's nothing much of interest for them here, and so the biggest blocks of trolls simply stay away.
Partly due to a virtuous circle; the community downvotes the more obvious ones into invisibility, and persistent trolls get banned, and the discussions are curated to select less fertile topics, and the controversy-ometer pushes flamewars off the front page.
The moderators here are very good at doing work upfront to save themselves work later, by making the site infertile ground for troublemakers.
I do. The direct call-out of a specific group of people for their position on the political spectrum is pretty much directly against what (I think) we're trying to do here. It's unnecessary, too. Could have just left it at "classic troll crowd".
Eh. I read it less as "general people that happen to support the current administration" and more as "posters on t_d," which is a very different thing in my mind, and yea, does point to users that are inherently trollish/toxic.
Although being - sometimes wildly - at odds with many of the leanings, assumptions, and perceived biases underlying the generality of HN, and often not sharing editorial viewpoints as expressed by dang and sctb, I am consistently in awe and absolutely drooling fanboy adulation over the quality of the moderation and everything else which keep - miraculously - this site running, healthy, useful, and mostly spam-free. From over here in a very different set of values and mind: Thank you for all that.
As for the article: King Canute was a Danish and for a while English king. Never Swedish.
It's a very interesting take to put a face on people who we only know for short acronyms and interaction which usually happen when things are not going smooth.
It's easy to think moderation might be too active (or not active enough) though it's not us sitting on their seats.
(Though I agree with the critique that the site is "too orange" and I'm all too happy to use the available customization option)
It’s not this story, it’s a global feature on both comments and stories which serves as a “undo” for fat fingering the upvote button. Before this feature you’d often see comments along the likes of “sorry, I accidentally downvoted you while trying to upvote.”
“In April, when a story about Katie Bouman, an M.I.T. researcher who helped develop a technology that captured the first photo of a black hole, rose to the front page, users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions.”
This is an odd statement as it implies the purpose was to undermine. Reading code and critiquing isn’t meant to “undermine” but to identify truth and constantly look for better ways.
What was, or at least felt, obvious was that there was a double standard being applied. Not just in the sense that such a witch hunt would be unlikely to happen to a man being lauded. But also that if there's one point that Hacker News could probably agree on it's that lines-of-code is a bad metric for evaluating programmers, let alone scientists.
There was also the pervasive sense of being on the side of the rest of the team, even though highlighting their contribution was the first thing Katie Bouman did. And at least Andrew Chael, who did write the plurality of the code in the GitHub repo, did come out strongly in favor of her and was horrified of the hate she got. Quote:
"So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman. Stop."
It's curious that, at least in my subjective impression, the tech community has a far larger problem with women than any of the other groups that have traditionally suffered discrimination: racism and especially homophobia really are extremely rare, at least overtly. But the uglyness Katie Bouman, or Ellen Pao, or Marissa Meyers brought out seems to be alive and well.
If a man received personal acclaim for a discovery, and someone looked at the repo and found that someone other than the man wrote most of the crunchier code, then yes I'd evaluate the acclaim for the man the same way.
Note most of the acclaim aimed at the scientist, rather than the team, was from the media. Whom as usual, likes to omit their own role.
If it is the case that she didn't contribute the most complicated stuff, then I can assure you it is not the first time in history that the face of a project is not the one that did the hardest work. Also as has repeatedly been said, she always said it was a team effort.
This is all said with the caveat that I didn't follow this 'controversy' and never cared to look at the contribution distribution of all the project members.
No. But if someone else checked the repo, I'd be interested. That said the media would be less likely to publish 'this young man took a photo of a black hole'.
> Also as has repeatedly been said, she always said it was a team effort.
Yep. Also mentioned in my comment you're replying to.
I think of this conflict as 'developers versus the media' - the media having pushed the narrative of 'a young woman who took a photo of a black hole'.
The media (who like to remove their own influence from discussions) have turned it into 'sexist developers vs young female scientist'. They've been very successful at doing that, yet again, because, well, they're the media. It's easy to shape a story when you control all outlets deemed noteworthy enough to cite.
Every person I showed this to was disgusted, as was I. So even if you disagree with the characterization, it certainly wasn't just the media, but also your fellow developers. It was a shameful moment (one of many, most of a similar kind) for HN that reflected horribly on developers, and the media called it up on that, as they should.
Whoever is "right", it wasn't just the media, but also lots of developers, who felt it was a shameful display of misogyny. So it is certainly wrong to claim that the media spun this story a certain way out of the blue.
Also, if I didn't think my opinion was correct it wouldn't be my opinion.
One could say the exact same thing except for the other position. Certainly there exist a number of journalists who think the media’s reporting on the topic was biased in order to garner more clicks and/or push an agenda, so it is wrong to claim Bouman just fell victim to sexists. Total non-argument.
One could say anything, but while it's unsurprising that women's achievements are highlighted because they are objectively a minority in a field that, like other fields, was shown to suffer from sexism in numerous studies, the response was different from when a man's achievement is highlighted, and that, too has been shown in studies. So I do think empirical observation is on my side as well.
As a counterpoint, comapre that with eg. reaction to QuickJS, when it was announced. People did not know who's to be credited for most of the work (only that two people claim copyright in the code), but if you look at the comments, it's all praise for the better known name, Fabrice Bellard, and almost no mention of the other person.
People will praise who they want to, and will bother to verify, only if it disagrees with their prejudices in the first place.
There's also a difference if those prejudices are based on something like past achievements of the praised person, or on something unrelated, like being a woman.
The reason people were trawling through her Github contributions and comparing them to other members of the team she worked with, and then posting about lines of code as if that's a measure of the value of someone's contribution to a project, was absolutely to undermine her work and show that she wasn't deserving of credit (despite the fact she was repeatedly quoted saying it wasn't all her and that it was a team effort).
When that story was on the front page it was one of the few times I've thought about leaving HN. It was embarrassing.
It was an overreaction which, however, was only enabled by absolutely lazy journalism. They basically took Bouman's Facebook post with a photo of her smiling next to the black hole claiming that she produced the picture, blowing her contributions way out of proportion. Some reports corrected this later that day, but by then, the shitstorm and investigation had already started. Perhaps understandably--she did not produce the picture. One could argue that Bouman's reaction was also way too delayed and she did not enough to clarify the situation, but this is perhaps understandable assuming she did not follow social media very closely.
The entire fiasco was mainly caused by the obsession of the media to put women at the forefront.
She did great work, and so did dozens (hundreds?) of others on that project.
She wasn't deserving of the level of credit that the media gave her when they cast her as the star, visionary, and quasi-leader of the whole enterprise.
Nobody was ever against Katie. They were against the way the media handled the story - by slanting the story to advance a political agenda that had nothing to do with the discovery itself, and then calling everyone who had a problem with that sexist while entirely eliding their own role in the controversy.
It was entirely a conflict between the media and the people calling out the media for obvious bias. As always, the media's response was to build a narrative where their critics were just trying to hurt [insert victim/victim group here].
>It just comes off as a "In your face! Racist white people."
It shouldn't, though.
Mentioning gender in relation to a woman's accomplishment is not an implicitly anti-male statement, nor is mentioning race in relation to the accomplishment of a person of color an anti-white statement. Nothing in any article about Katie Bouman was disparaging of men or white people or anyone.
>I'm fairly certain that most sane folk could care less about the gender or colour of the person making progress for mankind.
Meaning no one who disagrees with your opinion on the matter is sane? Yet reacting defensively and interpreting any mention of gender or race as hostility doesn't seem particularly sane to me.
For what it's worth, my only interaction with dang was being gently chided for a slightly glib dismissal at the top of a comment I made. The phrasing I used is very common (and treated as harmless) where I was brought up in Yorkshire. But he was right; without the benefit of that context it came over as rude. I've been a bit more careful since.
I've gotten into a couple of arguments with dang and have never found him to be unfair, although I do think he sometimes interprets criticism of the site or the community as an insult to him personally.
That said, it's better to have moderators who care than moderators who don't.
If there's one critique that I believe is paramount it's that HN has, due to its readership, an ethical obligation that goes beyond making discussions all nice and civil.
Political issues are obviously divisive and it's perfectly fine to keep stuff like the El Paso massacre of the front page. But when hot-button issues intersect with technology, the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility.
Yes, articles about, for example, discriminatory ML do often make it to the front page. But in my impression, that topic (as well as employment discrimination, culture-wars-adjacent scandals in tech academia etc) are far more likely to be quickly flagged into oblivion than similarly political takes that just happen to be in line with HN's prevailing attitude (e.g. cloudflare-shouldnt-ban-<x>).
The article impressively articulates what toll divisiveness takes on the moderators: Even if I read the same ugly comments, I am unlikely to experience the sharpness of emotion that apparently comes with considering the community one's baby, and making it's failures one's own. When such divisiveness is then reflected in the "real world" of mass media, the pressure only increases.
But as this article shows, abdicating the responsibility by keeping the topics sterile is similarly suspect, in the sense of fiddling while Rome burns. I believe a willingness to confront the ugly sides of technology with some courage of conviction would eventually be recognised, even if it may occasionally involve a bit of a mess.
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