IMO, the most important work that upvotes and downvotes do is to move comments up and down the page.
In that context, HN consensus on downvoting jokes makes more sense. I like a good joke, but they belong on the bottom of the page after the "serious" conversation. It's unfortunate that it's overloaded with karma, but complicating the upvote/downvote system has other drawbacks.
Agreed. Humour is a good part of good conversation and an excellent way to provide insight without seeming to be condescending and/or obnoxious.
That being said,it does take skill to squeeze in a dad joke in a discussion of abstract computing problems related to 8081s and I'll go on a limb that HN not lenient on badly executed D-jokes as say reddit would for the attempt.
what about relevant/important things that many people don't agree with? Preventing any community from becoming 1-sided seems like a hard problem to solve, but no less important.
I’ve also seen him be accused of biases involving his supposedly being Chinese. It’s sad when anything on HN turns into a flame war, and it would happen a lot more without his constant intervention.
If you had a second stealth account to join discussions Im sure its plenty stimulating. But even just reading might be enough. HN is full of lurkers who spend an insane amount of time here.
edit: Im not saying the moderators have stealth accounts!
As someone who moderates and has moderated content involving a whole lot of users, it can be taxing and sometimes mind numbing when people don’t follow the rules and you get spam. I’m sure HN has spam detection and removal in its ever improving code, but there would still be a lot to handle manually when it comes to guideline violations. In my experience elsewhere, there may be cases that aren’t clear cut as to whether they’re appropriate or what the writer intended to convey. Especially on a forum where people from different cultures converge, there’s a lot of space to misunderstand and be misunderstood.
At the same time, being able to read and learn from other people’s thoughts is always a stimulating experience. It gives opportunities to develop better mental models on certain things and also be able to explain certain things better to others.
So yeah, there are pros and cons, but I wouldn’t want to do this without a few other people who can take the workload and provide a break when it gets too tiring and exhausting.
Risking violation of "don't feed the trolls" here to reply: that seems unnecessarily harsh. FTR I'm not downvoting you any further, but responding in case you have more specific and articulate criticism to level.
If you're going to make this sort of accusation, you should link to the thread so people can make up their own minds. With linkless insinuations, the actual story is usually significantly different from what is being insinuated.
The problem with astroturf accusations is that they are all flamebait (even if true), off-topic meta noise (the point stops being discussed in favor of the commenters), and worst of all unfalsifiable (how do you prove you're not a shill?). I've been spending a lot more time on political boards as of late, and I've yet to see accusations along these lines be even a net neutral. On balance, they're always bad.
I have written comments here that could be interpreted as harshly critical of specific YC companies, and they stand or fall on their own merits and community votes, not mod bias. They do a good job here.
I can't say for HN, but the general answer is yes. Social systems tend to produce a lot of novel behavior, with plenty of surprising second- and third-order effects. Dealing with jerks, trolls, griefers, etc, is an arms race; they're always looking for new ways to mess things up. And the tools in this space are constantly evolving, too; for example, there's a lot of interesting ML work being done for automated content tagging.
Plus the content here is generally of intrinsic interest, and the commentary / community of sufficient quality that working in its active defense likely carries some of its own reward in the doing.
I've moderated forums similar to HN and it's a mixed bag. There are pretty much always troublesome users who deliberately look for ways to push boundaries or break rules in spirit but not in letter. Dealing with them is a huge drain and it can be really depressing to find out how many people there are going out of their way to make your community unpleasant. Or you spend half your time deleting the same racial slurs from the same 5 or 6 people who keep evading bans.
100% agreed. And for a long time, too. Back in 2015 when they banned a notorious jerk, I sent them a cookie basket. I should probably do it again, as good moderation is woefully underappreciated.
+1. I was having a really bad day several months ago and in a spat with a higher karma user who I really thought was in the wrong. @dang stepped in and just about banned me -- but stopped short and said this:
> There's clearly a pattern here. I'm not going to ban you now because you've also posted good comments, but please don't post any more personal attacks to HN, and please avoid tedious tit-for-tat entanglements with other users where the argument slides further to the right of the page as it slides further down in quality.
It sounds pretty stupid to say that I had a change of heart moment there, but I did. Whether or not I disagreed with another user on the internet was besides the point -- what was I getting out of /engaging/ with it that way? Was I acting the way I would want someone else to behave in a community? Of course not.
It turns out (as is often the case) that I was /extremely/ unhappy with my old job, burnt out and really struggling to keep it together and prevent the toxicity of my management chain from seeping into my personal life. Altogether very unsuccessfully, I might add. So I left. I didn't like the person I was turning into on the internet, pandemic or not.
Now, in retrospect, while I don't disagree with the content of what I said, I cringe with how I said it, and that I even engaged in the first place. In large part because that kind of engagement goes against the spirit of this forum which I cherish so much and find a reprieve from much of the rest of the internet.
A reprieve in large part due to the tireless, high quality work of @dang -- a reprieve that I myself threatened. Now isn't that self-destructive and ironic? Well, if you're reading this @dang, thanks for not banning me. You taught me a valuable lesson which I already knew but which just wasn't sinking in. I'd like to hope I am beginning to more deeply internalize the lesson you taught me that day.
While I have never been banned, I have been warned several times by dang about my behavior and I deserved every one of them. It seems to have worked too, because a lot of times I'll write a nasty comment and there will be this little voice in my head asking "what's dang going to think of this?" and I'll either edit it, not post it, or delete it.
When I feel a bit to much about a subject I open notepad and write the comment there and then just close the window if it feels inappropriate. This way there is no risk that I accidentally post it but it still feels like I got to say what I wanted to say. And then I can write something more levelheaded.
There's also the 'delay' setting that you can set in your HN user profile, which gives you 1-10 minutes to edit your comment before it becomes visible to others. This has saved my bacon on many occasions.
Never knew it was built in. I do the same as other people: I type it into the text box, walk away, come back to my computer later and if I still think it’s worth posting, do so. Probably abandon 75% of my “contributions” that way.
It also helps that you can only post like 5 times per 24 hour period. Helps me to not waste my quota on low value replies. It doesn’t look like everyone on the site is subject to that limit though—still trying to figure that one out... are there commenters with super powers that can ignore the 5/day limit?
You've been experiencing that because your account is rate limited. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. I've looked through your recent history and it seems fine, so normally we'd remove that restriction from your account—but you just said it was helpful, so maybe I shouldn't? You're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com if you want it removed.
Oh man, I do love it when systems provide me tools to stop my arsehole nature coming out. Sometimes I can't do it myself. I'll be enabling this for sure.
I really need to start using this, thank you so much! Not sure why I never payed much attention to those settings... but I know I edit my comments way too much after posting.
As for dang and his moderation, I appreciate very much his not-so-gentle nudging towards better conversation. I still fail frequently, but I try (and hope I am doing better). I had a particular ban that I got annoyed about because I thought the other guy deserved one too, but the real lesson was that it was about my response... and while it took a while, I took the correction to heart. Thanks dang for that, and for putting up with my more unothordox comments in a time when that is less and less tolerated.
I recall receiving a nudge from dang to be more charitable years ago. I'd like to think it set me in a better direction since. A small change in slope leads to a big change in y-intercept down the line, to use a math analogy.
I've grown to really appreciate his style of active moderation.
> If you read the profile the New Yorker published about us last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article (and it's something of a miracle of openness and intelligence that she was able to get past that—the shock experience really is that bad).
I suppose I should clarify that that was not based on anything Anna said to us. It was just my interpretation of (my memory of) what she wrote. So anybody can read the article and decide whether they agree.
Swift invisible action when facing bad faith actors; sporadic public call outs for quick attitude correction; and consistent helpful presence like multi-page reminders and clarifications on the inner workings of this forum.
I find your style of moderation to be the golden standard on how to foster a healthy online community.
Oh so he gets to shadowban other people and get credit for telling you about the secret crazy punishments they use here.
Shadowbanning is psychopathy and if you disagree, then logically you should never have been told about it.
Thanks for linking that. TIL: sorting rank is a function of timestamp and votes, so when the mods push a story back to the front page, instead of special-casing the behavior, they just (get a computer to) fabricate a submission timestamp that puts the story in appropriate place on the front page.
It's a clever hack, alright, but dang if I didn't start to think I was going crazy, because something felt off with timestamps and surely the mods wouldn't be silently messing with those...
It's not a great solution because it confuses the people who notice. The problem is that it's even more confusing if we re-up posts that say "3 days ago" or whatever onto the front page. Then the threads fill up with "why is this 3 days ago post on the front page"?
Another option would be to clone the old submission into a new one, but then we get more dupes. And I don't know of any viable fourth option.
Fourth option - don't show dates or timestamps at all. The age of the actual article is what matters, and people can find that out by actually reading the article.
I think there's a lot of information in those timestamps. They convey the rhythms of the site. Of course that's also why fudging them causes confusion...
Maybe display the old timestamp, but also display a visible "re-up" tag next to it? This way it'll be obvious the submission was reinserted manually to give it a second chance.
I've had several submissions re-upped. I nominate others (via email) on occaision. '2nd chance nom', plus submission link.
Do NOT ask me to do this --- I base my recommendations on what strikes me as 1) credible content 2) that seems underappreciated. The submission queue ("new" link in top menue) is quite busy.
Haha yes I discovered this like a year ago, and still get a kick out of it when I'm so overloaded that I am reflecting on usernames as opposed to getting work done...
I’m delighted to announce that Daniel Gackle (pronounced Gackley), who has already been doing most of the moderation for the last 18 months, is going to join YC full-time to be in charge of the HN community. Many HN users know Daniel as gruseom, though now he’s going to switch to the slightly more legit sounding dang.
I'm going to throw one out for dang here. I took your moderating personally when I first joined here, got banned for some comments I didn't think were that bad, hell i've made worse since, spent a while posting greyed out comments going off at dang, posted some not so shitty comments that got given a chance, realized I should try harder in my comments and just push my way back in by writing things that contribute better to HN.
It would have been easy to start a new account, but I liked warring with dang at the time. I even emailed him a bunch appealing my, what I still believe is not really all that bad of a comment, but I accept why it got me in shit as a newer commenter. It spurred me to just try harder at contributing better.
Eventually, I was just randomly unbanned.
Since then, i've come appreciate HN's moderation style.
There's really not many places on the internet with such lax account rules, yet mostly good conversation.
I appreciate the surprisingly wide range of topics and viewpoints generally allowed here. It does get a bit echo chambery, but mostly, any issue tends to get both sides heard as long as comments are written constructively.
Also, just learning about the purpose of this site helped. This is a news website, first and foremost, for people interested in funding from YC. It may have expanded since then, but the moderation does reflect the intended purpose of this site and just generally the kind of discourse expected from people interested in YC funding or other such things.
I respect how you've grown as a result of your interaction with HN. We're not about trying to stay just below the line here. There's no nefarious Man holding us down. We just want a certain level of civil discourse. I try not to say anything here that I wouldn't say in person, or wouldn't want tied to my real identity. I can be obnoxious at times, here and in person, and I appreciate being called out for it. HN is now the only place I interact with random Internet people, because the civility level is so high.
It always bugged me that Scott never got a proper send-off. He’s been gone for a year now. He did so much work, but didn’t even get a thank-you-goodbye.
But it’s not my place to make a fuss about it. I just wish I knew what ended up happening to him. (If you’re reading this, Scott, I hope you’ve been well!)
We spent a few years doing some enjoyable work together on Lumen, a Lisp for JS and Lua. I’m not sure we were friends, but it was interesting to get to know him, especially before he was an HN mod.
I wish I didn’t have a plane to catch in 30 minutes, otherwise I’d write up all the things I learned from working with him. But he was one of the most effective hackers I’ve ever seen. Crucially, in the communication department. If you had a question, Scott had an answer, or at least a lead, often within 5 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since.
He was not merely a fan of simplicity, but seemed to shun complexity the way outer space shuns air. One of the finest examples of his work is, in my opinion, a library he wrote for Lumen called Motor: https://github.com/sctb/motor
To this day, any one of you can open any file in that repo and understand exactly what it’s doing at a glance. I challenge you to find anything surprising or confusing.
I don’t understand why he seemed to vanish into thin air a year ago, but the explanation is probably mundane. He once shared some wonderful music he made, so I like to imagine he went off to make music in some quiet mountain town or something.
I spent years of my life working with him, directly and indirectly. I got to know him on a personal level. None of your business, perhaps, but notice not one thank-you in this entire thread has been directed at sctb, and most readers probably have no clue who I’m talking about. That’s how little recognition he got.
Scott Bell was instrumental to the business of Hacker News. He contributed in a thousand ways, both small and large.
You did not spend "years of your life" working with Scott. You have, though, spent years trying to stir up trouble on HN in an astonishing variety of frankly very creative ways. This misleading story is the latest in that long sequence.
Although we've banned you many times in many incarnations, we've always been generous with letting you back into the community—indeed, generous at a level that most people simply would not believe if they'd seen what you put us through. That generosity is conditional, however, on you keeping this meta/drama fixation out of your posts here. So please stop, and please don't restart, not along this line nor any other.
Dan, there is no drama here. No reasonable person could read what I wrote and interpret it as drama. You also don’t get to tell me who I am friends with, or how I regard them. I don’t know what your relationship was to Scott, but mine was an association formed over many years. You may not think that “friends over the internet” are real, but many would disagree.
You are threatening to ban a community member simply for thanking Scott for the many ways he helped, and attempting to give some recognition to the tremendous work he put in. At some point I simply have to raise my arms and say “Ok, if you’re going to be completely unreasonable, even to the point of publicly lying, then I have no choice but to surrender.”
I am still astonished that you claimed that I didn’t spend years of my life working with Scott. He was my friend; I submitted nearly 200 pull requests to https://github.com/sctb/lumen/pulls dating back to 2017. He was also there for me during a dark period of my life, and that small act of kindness has stayed with me since.
I don’t understand your fixation with me. I challenge you to point out a single comment I’ve made, over the last year, that is in violation of any of the HN guidelines to such an egregious extent that a permanent ban is warranted.
I agree that this is a complete distraction from the overall goal of keeping HN happy and growing. So I propose that if you want this to stop, whatever “this” is, then you either need to explain in detail what it is I am doing wrong, or you simply must ban me and be done with it. And can you really argue that a ban is moral and justified on that basis?
I have done nothing to harm this community. Any reader who goes over my comments and seriously reads them would disagree with you that my presence here is harmful. YC founders have vouched for me, to you. I have 2k followers on twitter who seem to like what I’m doing. And I have absolutely no idea why you are fixated on me. From my point of view, you have harassed me for years for seemingly harmless comments. My wife has read almost everything I’ve written, and has proofread it, and she’s one of the smartest hackers I know; she agrees that I haven’t done anything wrong here.
You haven’t welcomed me back into anywhere. You permit me to post comments and to write for you at your pleasure. And I have tried hard to please you. But if you would simply leave me alone and get over the past — which is now three years past — then everything would be fine.
Your opinion has enormous influence. People will blindly believe pretty much anything you write. So you’ve now put me in a position of saying nothing and keeping my head down, or saying that Scott was indeed my friend and that we did indeed work together for years, as anyone with two eyes can see in Lumen’s pull request history.
In summary, I am happy to toe the line and do exactly what you want — you yourself have said that “we unban those who give us a reason to believe they will follow the rules,” and I submit that I have given you ample reason to believe I will. But if you want me to alter my behavior, then what exactly do you want me to do? Not write “Scott Bell was cool as heck, and it was fun to do some lisp hacking with him”?
This has gone on long enough. If this is to be my final reply to HN, then I suppose it’s fitting that it’s addressed to you: please relax, re-read my comments (and remember to assume good faith), and believe me when I say that I am trying, hard, to do what you want.
I asked my wife for advice on whether I should say anything, or leave this alone. She said she didn’t have any good advice for me, but that she would reply. She said that this is a stupid thing to do, and the fastest way to lose all the privileges I’ve worked hard to regain, but that she would do it, on the basis of “her brain would implode if she didn’t say anything...
When I first came to HN from reddit, I posted some jokey nonsense comment. A moderator gently scolded me. I really disliked it. Now, I see the wisdom of keeping the jokes to a minimum and focusing in thoughtful discussion. So thank you, mods.
That's what impressed me when I first came across HN - the signal-to-noise ratio. The comments sections were always filled with thoughtfully written comments that provided useful insights into interesting topics.
Thank you @dang for your diligence and commitment to the task.
For me the noise is still there, even if it takes another form. Jokes, puns and nastiness are swapped for hacker-y style rants (we know how idiosyncratic many of hackers are) or people who talk about things they lack the knowledge of.
Ironically, under front page HN submissions where comments would give some context, often there are none. Who upvoted them all the way to the front page? People who want to feel intelligent? Edit: this may be related to the moderator's override function where they put some submissions manually on the front page.
Hot take: the fact that HN comments have an academic/professional tone doesn't make the noise go away. It just makes it easier to pass for useful comments.
On huge threads with like 1k comments, I do find that the high quality ones float to the surface (having more to do with stuff like hiding vote counts and restricting down vote access IMO). However, it's not hard to find people confidently talking out of their ass making it to the top of threads with even hundreds of comments. Look for people talking about something you are an expert in (or do a brief google search on a topic somebody is claiming expertise in, especially if it is related to ideology) and it isn't hard to spot. There are even all the bad cliche comments of the other platforms even if they aren't as simple as "have an upvote my friend" or "username checks out".
I find threads on politics and culture particularly unbearable here because it's the exact same chest beating and narratives that you will find on any other platform except that the posters possess the same self-rightousness and academic tone as if they were talking about mathematical fact and not a political opinion. Even more so, it often comes without the self-awareness to know that your opinions and arguments are most often being taken from whatever social media you frequent. Everybody is a "free thinker" here even though they spout off the exact same political arguments as everybody else in their clique. It makes some threads pretty toxic IMO because of how seriously everyone takes themselves. I'm of course making general claims to which there are exceptions, but this is something I've seen.
Thinking that you need to be super-intelligent to post on or browse HN is a bad meme. Take the guy below me that thinks jokes on HN "require higher levels of intelligence to parse". It's the same mentality that part of the Rick and Morty fan base gets made fun of for.
To make a distinction, my comment applies specifically to the comments that pertain to technical topics and that which are backed by actual (scientific) research and data.
I have no interest in the cultural warfare that supposedly educated ideologues seek to impose on society at large.
There are still jokes, they just require higher levels of intelligence to parse now. Without the ability to inject obvious humor, many jokes straddle the threshold of Poe's Law. Sometimes people mistake a thoughtful sounding well written comment as sincere.
I appreciate dang's moderation. It's generally fair and doesn't discriminate based on viewpoint. Flame wars are pretty tame here and usually devoid of personal attacks.
321 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadSeriously tho... shout out to dang for all the hard work he does.
(Please don't vote me up if you agree - I don't want the karma - just comment instead...)
In that context, HN consensus on downvoting jokes makes more sense. I like a good joke, but they belong on the bottom of the page after the "serious" conversation. It's unfortunate that it's overloaded with karma, but complicating the upvote/downvote system has other drawbacks.
Unsurprisingly, I’ve found levity is best received when incorporating a kernel of fact or observation. Also, timezone matters.
Jokes are easy. Comedy is hard.
That being said,it does take skill to squeeze in a dad joke in a discussion of abstract computing problems related to 8081s and I'll go on a limb that HN not lenient on badly executed D-jokes as say reddit would for the attempt.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052
I always thought it was just a mild expletive that reflected the role of moderation
I agree that he does very fine work here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494093
As a web developer, the more I do the more I crave novel challenges. Writing CRUD apps or getters and setters gets old fast.
Are there novel challenges with content moderation?
edit: Im not saying the moderators have stealth accounts!
[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493856
At the same time, being able to read and learn from other people’s thoughts is always a stimulating experience. It gives opportunities to develop better mental models on certain things and also be able to explain certain things better to others.
So yeah, there are pros and cons, but I wouldn’t want to do this without a few other people who can take the workload and provide a break when it gets too tiring and exhausting.
The drama is exciting though.
Thank you both for your work!
> There's clearly a pattern here. I'm not going to ban you now because you've also posted good comments, but please don't post any more personal attacks to HN, and please avoid tedious tit-for-tat entanglements with other users where the argument slides further to the right of the page as it slides further down in quality.
It sounds pretty stupid to say that I had a change of heart moment there, but I did. Whether or not I disagreed with another user on the internet was besides the point -- what was I getting out of /engaging/ with it that way? Was I acting the way I would want someone else to behave in a community? Of course not.
It turns out (as is often the case) that I was /extremely/ unhappy with my old job, burnt out and really struggling to keep it together and prevent the toxicity of my management chain from seeping into my personal life. Altogether very unsuccessfully, I might add. So I left. I didn't like the person I was turning into on the internet, pandemic or not.
Now, in retrospect, while I don't disagree with the content of what I said, I cringe with how I said it, and that I even engaged in the first place. In large part because that kind of engagement goes against the spirit of this forum which I cherish so much and find a reprieve from much of the rest of the internet.
A reprieve in large part due to the tireless, high quality work of @dang -- a reprieve that I myself threatened. Now isn't that self-destructive and ironic? Well, if you're reading this @dang, thanks for not banning me. You taught me a valuable lesson which I already knew but which just wasn't sinking in. I'd like to hope I am beginning to more deeply internalize the lesson you taught me that day.
He also let me back in after I apologized via email, which I appreciate.
It also helps that you can only post like 5 times per 24 hour period. Helps me to not waste my quota on low value replies. It doesn’t look like everyone on the site is subject to that limit though—still trying to figure that one out... are there commenters with super powers that can ignore the 5/day limit?
As for dang and his moderation, I appreciate very much his not-so-gentle nudging towards better conversation. I still fail frequently, but I try (and hope I am doing better). I had a particular ban that I got annoyed about because I thought the other guy deserved one too, but the real lesson was that it was about my response... and while it took a while, I took the correction to heart. Thanks dang for that, and for putting up with my more unothordox comments in a time when that is less and less tolerated.
I've grown to really appreciate his style of active moderation.
> If you read the profile the New Yorker published about us last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article (and it's something of a miracle of openness and intelligence that she was able to get past that—the shock experience really is that bad).
Swift invisible action when facing bad faith actors; sporadic public call outs for quick attitude correction; and consistent helpful presence like multi-page reminders and clarifications on the inner workings of this forum.
I find your style of moderation to be the golden standard on how to foster a healthy online community.
2. I got warnings beforehand and deserved it.
Thanks for everything!
You've helped keep HN readable, corrected countless title and link errors, and prevented heated discussions from devolving into fights.
I also am super thankful for your help getting my "Show HN" post to the front page.
We all appreciate you.
It's a clever hack, alright, but dang if I didn't start to think I was going crazy, because something felt off with timestamps and surely the mods wouldn't be silently messing with those...
Another option would be to clone the old submission into a new one, but then we get more dupes. And I don't know of any viable fourth option.
Would that not be viable?
I've had several submissions re-upped. I nominate others (via email) on occaision. '2nd chance nom', plus submission link.
Do NOT ask me to do this --- I base my recommendations on what strikes me as 1) credible content 2) that seems underappreciated. The submission queue ("new" link in top menue) is quite busy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767296
I’m delighted to announce that Daniel Gackle (pronounced Gackley), who has already been doing most of the moderation for the last 18 months, is going to join YC full-time to be in charge of the HN community. Many HN users know Daniel as gruseom, though now he’s going to switch to the slightly more legit sounding dang.
https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac...
It would have been easy to start a new account, but I liked warring with dang at the time. I even emailed him a bunch appealing my, what I still believe is not really all that bad of a comment, but I accept why it got me in shit as a newer commenter. It spurred me to just try harder at contributing better.
Eventually, I was just randomly unbanned. Since then, i've come appreciate HN's moderation style.
There's really not many places on the internet with such lax account rules, yet mostly good conversation.
I appreciate the surprisingly wide range of topics and viewpoints generally allowed here. It does get a bit echo chambery, but mostly, any issue tends to get both sides heard as long as comments are written constructively.
Also, just learning about the purpose of this site helped. This is a news website, first and foremost, for people interested in funding from YC. It may have expanded since then, but the moderation does reflect the intended purpose of this site and just generally the kind of discourse expected from people interested in YC funding or other such things.
But it’s not my place to make a fuss about it. I just wish I knew what ended up happening to him. (If you’re reading this, Scott, I hope you’ve been well!)
We spent a few years doing some enjoyable work together on Lumen, a Lisp for JS and Lua. I’m not sure we were friends, but it was interesting to get to know him, especially before he was an HN mod.
I wish I didn’t have a plane to catch in 30 minutes, otherwise I’d write up all the things I learned from working with him. But he was one of the most effective hackers I’ve ever seen. Crucially, in the communication department. If you had a question, Scott had an answer, or at least a lead, often within 5 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since.
He was not merely a fan of simplicity, but seemed to shun complexity the way outer space shuns air. One of the finest examples of his work is, in my opinion, a library he wrote for Lumen called Motor: https://github.com/sctb/motor
To this day, any one of you can open any file in that repo and understand exactly what it’s doing at a glance. I challenge you to find anything surprising or confusing.
I don’t understand why he seemed to vanish into thin air a year ago, but the explanation is probably mundane. He once shared some wonderful music he made, so I like to imagine he went off to make music in some quiet mountain town or something.
Scott Bell was instrumental to the business of Hacker News. He contributed in a thousand ways, both small and large.
Although we've banned you many times in many incarnations, we've always been generous with letting you back into the community—indeed, generous at a level that most people simply would not believe if they'd seen what you put us through. That generosity is conditional, however, on you keeping this meta/drama fixation out of your posts here. So please stop, and please don't restart, not along this line nor any other.
You are threatening to ban a community member simply for thanking Scott for the many ways he helped, and attempting to give some recognition to the tremendous work he put in. At some point I simply have to raise my arms and say “Ok, if you’re going to be completely unreasonable, even to the point of publicly lying, then I have no choice but to surrender.”
I am still astonished that you claimed that I didn’t spend years of my life working with Scott. He was my friend; I submitted nearly 200 pull requests to https://github.com/sctb/lumen/pulls dating back to 2017. He was also there for me during a dark period of my life, and that small act of kindness has stayed with me since.
I don’t understand your fixation with me. I challenge you to point out a single comment I’ve made, over the last year, that is in violation of any of the HN guidelines to such an egregious extent that a permanent ban is warranted.
I agree that this is a complete distraction from the overall goal of keeping HN happy and growing. So I propose that if you want this to stop, whatever “this” is, then you either need to explain in detail what it is I am doing wrong, or you simply must ban me and be done with it. And can you really argue that a ban is moral and justified on that basis?
I have done nothing to harm this community. Any reader who goes over my comments and seriously reads them would disagree with you that my presence here is harmful. YC founders have vouched for me, to you. I have 2k followers on twitter who seem to like what I’m doing. And I have absolutely no idea why you are fixated on me. From my point of view, you have harassed me for years for seemingly harmless comments. My wife has read almost everything I’ve written, and has proofread it, and she’s one of the smartest hackers I know; she agrees that I haven’t done anything wrong here.
You haven’t welcomed me back into anywhere. You permit me to post comments and to write for you at your pleasure. And I have tried hard to please you. But if you would simply leave me alone and get over the past — which is now three years past — then everything would be fine.
Your opinion has enormous influence. People will blindly believe pretty much anything you write. So you’ve now put me in a position of saying nothing and keeping my head down, or saying that Scott was indeed my friend and that we did indeed work together for years, as anyone with two eyes can see in Lumen’s pull request history.
In summary, I am happy to toe the line and do exactly what you want — you yourself have said that “we unban those who give us a reason to believe they will follow the rules,” and I submit that I have given you ample reason to believe I will. But if you want me to alter my behavior, then what exactly do you want me to do? Not write “Scott Bell was cool as heck, and it was fun to do some lisp hacking with him”?
This has gone on long enough. If this is to be my final reply to HN, then I suppose it’s fitting that it’s addressed to you: please relax, re-read my comments (and remember to assume good faith), and believe me when I say that I am trying, hard, to do what you want.
I asked my wife for advice on whether I should say anything, or leave this alone. She said she didn’t have any good advice for me, but that she would reply. She said that this is a stupid thing to do, and the fastest way to lose all the privileges I’ve worked hard to regain, but that she would do it, on the basis of “her brain would implode if she didn’t say anything...
Thank you @dang for your diligence and commitment to the task.
Ironically, under front page HN submissions where comments would give some context, often there are none. Who upvoted them all the way to the front page? People who want to feel intelligent? Edit: this may be related to the moderator's override function where they put some submissions manually on the front page.
On huge threads with like 1k comments, I do find that the high quality ones float to the surface (having more to do with stuff like hiding vote counts and restricting down vote access IMO). However, it's not hard to find people confidently talking out of their ass making it to the top of threads with even hundreds of comments. Look for people talking about something you are an expert in (or do a brief google search on a topic somebody is claiming expertise in, especially if it is related to ideology) and it isn't hard to spot. There are even all the bad cliche comments of the other platforms even if they aren't as simple as "have an upvote my friend" or "username checks out".
I find threads on politics and culture particularly unbearable here because it's the exact same chest beating and narratives that you will find on any other platform except that the posters possess the same self-rightousness and academic tone as if they were talking about mathematical fact and not a political opinion. Even more so, it often comes without the self-awareness to know that your opinions and arguments are most often being taken from whatever social media you frequent. Everybody is a "free thinker" here even though they spout off the exact same political arguments as everybody else in their clique. It makes some threads pretty toxic IMO because of how seriously everyone takes themselves. I'm of course making general claims to which there are exceptions, but this is something I've seen.
Thinking that you need to be super-intelligent to post on or browse HN is a bad meme. Take the guy below me that thinks jokes on HN "require higher levels of intelligence to parse". It's the same mentality that part of the Rick and Morty fan base gets made fun of for.
I have no interest in the cultural warfare that supposedly educated ideologues seek to impose on society at large.