Comment on I wish there were more articles about tech not tech biz
cosmic_slate@dmv.social 6 months agoEditing post titles does not count as quality control, in the same ways that some of reddits have such strict rules to the point that mods delete anything that is not exactly within the lines.
…huh? It leaves discussion threads intact while fixing titles to be more reflective of the source material or more reflective of updates to an event. How is this not quality control (and, in turn, moderation)?
HN mods (dang, especifically) don’t care about power trips, because they have actual power
Please take a moment to read the comment you’re replying to. See the last statement where I call out “You can have strong moderation that works out if mods enforce the rules for the sake of quality content, not for the sake of being an internet hall monitor.”
HN is not a single-topic community, like a Lemmy group. If you create a /c/technology and say it is a place to post “Anything that good hackers would find interesting”, it would quickly derail into a constant meta-discussion.
The extent of how single-topic a community is depends on the community and moderators. I don’t know what you’re trying to say here.
rglullis@communick.news 6 months ago
The discussion started because OP wants to have “more hard tech” and less “tech biz news”. How do you think you’d enforce that, and how would you avoid splitting the ones that do not agree with that direction?
On HN, it’s easy to avoid splittering the community because there is no “sub-HN”. The ones that are not interested or oppose the guidelines have no other option but to leave.
On Reddit or Lemmy, it’s quite easy to “fork” a community or simply creating another for the more specific niches. So you don’t end up with a single /c/technology, but instead we get a “popular” /c/technology (for the lowest denominator) and the more specific “/c/hard_tech” or “/c/true_tech”.
cosmic_slate@dmv.social 6 months ago
I agree with your assertion that above a certain size you need strong moderation but disagree that it has to be toxic.
There are two components to being successful at strong moderation: you need mods that are opinionated but work to the benefit of the community (I think dang does a decent job at this) and a community that trusts the moderation.
Comparing HN and Lemmy, HN generally trusts their mods while Lemmy does not. As a result, dang on HN can prune low-effort threads and it doesn’t cause much of an uproar, but doing this on Lemmy would probably be much more difficult.
As far as enforcement, I’d just remove the fluff threads that get the same, repeated 5-6 comments. We already know everyone’s opinion about Elon Musk, the potential perils of AI, and the occasional string of threads over 2-3 weeks when $bigtechnologycompany doing $unpopularthing with a new article that rehashes information for clicks. People may disagree, but that’s okay. The goal should be to try to judge content on it’s discussion merits, not the user who posted it or personal beliefs. There will be screwups, but the community will need to assume good intent and the moderator will need to own up to mistakes.
HN doesn’t try to cater to everyone and that’s their greatest strength. If my theoretical approach causes people to leave, that’s OK.
A lot of communities/subreddits/forums prioritize a growing user count number instead of fostering insightful discussion. I think this is what causes the huge communities to grow bland and foster an environment for abusive mods. It’s one thing to want to claim “I moderate a forum with 500k people”, but it’s another to say “I learn something new from my community every day”.
I’m content with c/technology and think the mods are doing a good job. It scratches the itch I want for being a general-purpose place to chat tech-related things but I would be elated to find a community that has a much higher bar for discussion.
rglullis@communick.news 6 months ago
Right, but that will also mean that the community will no longer be “big”. That’s my point.
If mods started going as far as deleting threads on the basis of “this discussion is already beaten to death and is not bringing anything new”, you can bet that this will be taken as an act of “censorship” and will cause everyone to leave to form their own factions - except maybe the ones that are aligned with the mods enough to understand the principles behind the decision.
cosmic_slate@dmv.social 6 months ago