I used to have a better view of HN moderation, it felt much like the aims here, plus a politics ban. But it feels like the site has shifted and a lot of right wing talking points are not being...
I used to have a better view of HN moderation, it felt much like the aims here, plus a politics ban. But it feels like the site has shifted and a lot of right wing talking points are not being seen as politics and being permitted while complaints about companies' activities are still being flagged to death.
Like just the other day there was a defense of a well known harassment site on the front page, dang was even participating in the thread so it's not like they were unaware.
AFAIK, flags are set by the community reports most of the time. Dang can override that, but they don't usually flag themselves (they can simply remove comments if it gets too bad). Even if...
AFAIK, flags are set by the community reports most of the time. Dang can override that, but they don't usually flag themselves (they can simply remove comments if it gets too bad). Even if overridden, a lot of that will still be downvoted to oblivion if certain crowds are present. It's no different from Reddit in that regard.
As someone with a long career in tech, but firmly outside the techbro-isphere, that pretty much sums it up for me.
...it has become a punch line and a punching bag for tech workers and engineers who see it as a locus of hubris, myopia, and exclusivity. A word that comes up frequently among its critics is “toxic.”
As someone with a long career in tech, but firmly outside the techbro-isphere, that pretty much sums it up for me.
That's a little surprising to me. Personally I'd rank it as less toxic than the "background radiation" level of the internet - like Reddit and other social media sites. In the "techbro-isphere"...
That's a little surprising to me. Personally I'd rank it as less toxic than the "background radiation" level of the internet - like Reddit and other social media sites.
In the "techbro-isphere" TeamBlind is by far the worst I've seen.
In my experience it's worse than the most mainstream subreddits if you're a woman or queer, especially once you scroll down in the comments. Any topic relating to "diversity" is a shitshow. Reddit...
In my experience it's worse than the most mainstream subreddits if you're a woman or queer, especially once you scroll down in the comments. Any topic relating to "diversity" is a shitshow. Reddit has worse places, but you have to go hunting for them, and it has far better places too.
I've never heard of TeamBlind, and given your description I think I'm safe steering clear lol
TeamBlind is a site where you have to verify your employee email domain. This puts a little brand logo next to your posts. Almost every post is ended with your total compensation, ex: "TC: 450k",...
TeamBlind is a site where you have to verify your employee email domain. This puts a little brand logo next to your posts. Almost every post is ended with your total compensation, ex: "TC: 450k", whether it's relevant or not. And there's this small level of illusion here because your employer is verified by the site, but your TC is not. So people can say whatever they want for TC with the implication that it's more true than it would be on another site.
People will post things like: "How can I buy a wife? TC: 500k" Basically it's all a dick measuring contest, patriarchy boiled down to its tech-bro-iest refined state. Occasionally there's some mildly racist stuff there because the wrong type of immigrants are getting too many positions in some company.
Human buying, or even human labour buying comments can pop up in web sub cultures where wealth and privilege are flaunted or just taken for granted.....I remember being part of a baby/parenting...
Human buying, or even human labour buying comments can pop up in web sub cultures where wealth and privilege are flaunted or just taken for granted.....I remember being part of a baby/parenting forum that regularly featured wealth flaunting threads talking about purchasing human labour in uncomfortable ways....
From this article, a comment by the proprietor of NGate about HN culture:
"Almost every post deals with the same topics: these are people who spend their lives trying to identify all the ways they can extract money from others without quite going to jail,”
Would you say that having the compensation be part of every post make TeamBlind even more focused on the American Psycho-ness of its money crazed users? What was the origin nap justification for even having that number instead of say, job title?
To be clear, it’s not a TC field you fill out. It’s like a signature users type out after the body of their comments. Thus it’s a result of the pre-existing culture in tech and not a direction...
To be clear, it’s not a TC field you fill out. It’s like a signature users type out after the body of their comments. Thus it’s a result of the pre-existing culture in tech and not a direction provided by the website.
It doesn't make it much better, but there's a very conservative international audience on Blind. It's very different from Hacker News. There's a reason there are so many in-jokes on Blind about...
It doesn't make it much better, but there's a very conservative international audience on Blind. It's very different from Hacker News. There's a reason there are so many in-jokes on Blind about anon commenters named Rajesh remaining forever single etc...
It doesn't. Just provides more context on where some of the weirdness comes from. It's unlikely to come from white tech bros in San Francisco. Blind has a lot of bitter commenters that want a visa...
It doesn't. Just provides more context on where some of the weirdness comes from. It's unlikely to come from white tech bros in San Francisco. Blind has a lot of bitter commenters that want a visa to Canada, America, or Europe, and many of them incorrectly think their opportunity was stolen by a DEI hire.
I don't actually think the participants in Blind and HN are that far apart, just a mix of some people are straight up trolling on Blind in a way that would get moderated on HN, and a different...
I don't actually think the participants in Blind and HN are that far apart, just a mix of some people are straight up trolling on Blind in a way that would get moderated on HN, and a different site culture leading to a much more mask off approach from people who genuinely think that way.
From my experience it’s derived from the unearned position of wealth and power given to young men. There is skill and effort involved in getting a high paid position in a major tech company. But...
From my experience it’s derived from the unearned position of wealth and power given to young men. There is skill and effort involved in getting a high paid position in a major tech company. But does it compare to what’s required to get $500k/year in any other industry? No. It’s the easiest way to get rich - if you’re lucky.
So there’s a gap here where guys come to the conclusion that they’re just amazing and believe it’s all deserved. Sure you’re great at being a cog in the corporate machine, write good Java and can excel on a leetcode interview. In my opinion that doesn’t mean you’re better than other people. But if you do fall for this mental trap you equate your income with your value as a human. And those with less income have less value of course.
The tech salaries in the US seem pretty crazy to me. $500k would be CEO type money for a medium size company here in most of Europe. Would be rare to see regular engineers at above 150k. Though...
The tech salaries in the US seem pretty crazy to me. $500k would be CEO type money for a medium size company here in most of Europe. Would be rare to see regular engineers at above 150k. Though taking in the living cost of living in San Francisco they might not be so rich.
The only thing I can compare it to is young men getting rich by stock or crypto (or inheritance) and that can easily lead to that kind of behavior.
In addition to this, the impression I get from being in the industry (though I could be wrong, it doesn’t come up in discussion a ton) is that that the majority of devs will never achieve total...
In addition to this, the impression I get from being in the industry (though I could be wrong, it doesn’t come up in discussion a ton) is that that the majority of devs will never achieve total comp this high, with most instead getting stuck somewhere significantly below that mark or moving into management or changing professions first.
Yes, you’d need to be at one of a few companies that pay this high and make it into a senior role. But even a mid level engineer at Google can make over $300k.
Yes, you’d need to be at one of a few companies that pay this high and make it into a senior role. But even a mid level engineer at Google can make over $300k.
Several bloggers I follow have tried to implement technical measures to block HN users from viewing their content, that typically just makes HN more antagonistic about it. Not just the users,...
Several bloggers I follow have tried to implement technical measures to block HN users from viewing their content, that typically just makes HN more antagonistic about it. Not just the users, either, HN itself has implemented countermeasures against the blocks.
A common remark I find on HN are complaints about the author of some blog with a specific target audience, not explaining the things that that audience can be expected to know, because it means...
A common remark I find on HN are complaints about the author of some blog with a specific target audience, not explaining the things that that audience can be expected to know, because it means the HN audience need to build their own context. I think there's a real expectation by some users on HN that the articles are written for the HN audience, rather than being written by one person for that person's audience and then shared by (a potentially different) someone to HN later.
A similar trend that I've seen is people who can't seem to distinguish between "clickbait" and "a narrative with a hook" - the HN audience in particular often has a low tolerance for the style of...
A similar trend that I've seen is people who can't seem to distinguish between "clickbait" and "a narrative with a hook" - the HN audience in particular often has a low tolerance for the style of article that's written as an exploration of the process the author went through.
It's a bit distracting to read about technology with misogyny and transphobia strewn about the comments section. Technology exists in a society, so it's impossible to avoid those topics ever being...
It's a bit distracting to read about technology with misogyny and transphobia strewn about the comments section. Technology exists in a society, so it's impossible to avoid those topics ever being even tangentially related.
I feel like the problem (read: not a problem with you specifically, just want to point out a shortfall of this kind of thinking) with this is that technology isn't and shouldn't be divorced from...
I feel like the problem (read: not a problem with you specifically, just want to point out a shortfall of this kind of thinking) with this is that technology isn't and shouldn't be divorced from diversity, especially in a world so increasingly reliant on it. It's mentioned in the OP article about photography and darker skinned people and how they're not being captured properly, and we've had discussions here on Tildes even about it. If we don't talk about diversity alongside the technology, we run the risk of leaving people behind unfairly.
There is a politics in everything and certainly there is a politics of technology, even more so nowadays that technology is everywhere and tech issues have become mainstream. The problem is that...
There is a politics in everything and certainly there is a politics of technology, even more so nowadays that technology is everywhere and tech issues have become mainstream. The problem is that if you take that reasoning too far, everything is connected, nothing is off-topic, and every forum becomes yet another political forum.
To avoid that happening in a specialized forum, you need to be rigorous about treating unrelated politics as off-topic, while still allowing it if it’s directly related. This distinction, about what counts as related politics, can’t be done rigorously - someone needs to make a call about a nebulous boundary.
Hacker News is a forum with very nebulous boundaries on what subjects are on-topic. They once tried to be strictly no-politics for a week and found that they couldn’t do it due to there being no agreement about what counts. Topics will still get flagged if people don’t see a technology angle, though.
I think lobste.rs has done better at being strictly no-politics but I don’t read it much and couldn’t really say. It turns out that if you remove the politics, it’s kind of boring?
Sure, but I feel like a quick eye test isn't necessarily difficult (maybe in my very cherry-picked examples, at least). I don't think an American style Biden v Trump should be the predominant...
This distinction, about what counts as related politics, can’t be done rigorously - someone needs to make a call about a nebulous boundary.
Sure, but I feel like a quick eye test isn't necessarily difficult (maybe in my very cherry-picked examples, at least). I don't think an American style Biden v Trump should be the predominant conversation in every conversation about AI, but if you say that "minorities have to do something different to get the same results using the same technology" is political, you end up in the same line of thinking of people screaming about politics that women, trans people, and minorities simply existing is "political".
Maybe that's why I wouldn't be a good moderator though, in that position I'd just ban people on sight for that lol.
Sorry, I don't follow. Did you reply to the wrong comment? What I'm saying is that discussion purely about tech, which should be for everyone, should consider everyone their target audience. The...
Sorry, I don't follow. Did you reply to the wrong comment? What I'm saying is that discussion purely about tech, which should be for everyone, should consider everyone their target audience. The two examples I made are for digital photography and AI and how they unfairly treat certain groups of people, which should be discussed in tech groups if people insist that tech is for everyone.
A potential reading of this comment in the context of the larger conversation is that women and trans people, even those interested in or working in tech, are not the target audience of HN and...
It's too hard for people to accept that they aren't the target audience, so they get into arguments about who ought to be the target audience instead.
A potential reading of this comment in the context of the larger conversation is that women and trans people, even those interested in or working in tech, are not the target audience of HN and should accept that the forum will contain casual misogyny and transphobia in the comments because they don't belong there in the first place.
I don't think this is a charitable reading, so I'm trying not to assume it's what you meant, but I'm having trouble parsing what else you're trying to say here.
I don't think it's actually possible for me to coherently respond to this comment without getting heated. I think the idea that women and trans people should just "accept that they're not the...
I don't think it's actually possible for me to coherently respond to this comment without getting heated. I think the idea that women and trans people should just "accept that they're not the target audience" of websites full of misogyny and transphobia and thus they have no right to criticize their toxicity actually abhorrent.
I suppose it depends on if you think the front page is a "community" or just an amalgamation of Reddit as a whole. Reddit these days has am uncanny ability to make any topic on the front page some...
Reddit has worse places, but you have to go hunting for them, and it has far better places too.
I suppose it depends on if you think the front page is a "community" or just an amalgamation of Reddit as a whole. Reddit these days has am uncanny ability to make any topic on the front page some controversy. Animal video? Someone is being abused somehow. Random moment of pain? Why was the camera person just sitting there?
Guess it depends on if you are basing this on pure cynicism or a group that truly believes they are oppressed.
I was specifically talking about the general treatment of women and trans people in comments -- not necessarily just controversial topics popping up, but what kind of response you could generally...
I was specifically talking about the general treatment of women and trans people in comments -- not necessarily just controversial topics popping up, but what kind of response you could generally expect if women or trans people came up in the comments (whether relevant to the main topic or not).
The last bit of your comment seems to imply you think what I'm talking about is something I'm making up somehow? I'm talking about the experiences I've had reading comments on both sites.
I was simply asking for clarification is if you consider The Front page of Reddit to be a "community". It isn't very hard for me to find any topic on Reddit's front page with a woman in any...
I was simply asking for clarification is if you consider The Front page of Reddit to be a "community". It isn't very hard for me to find any topic on Reddit's front page with a woman in any capacity and find sexism. But that wouldn't be fair to users who highly curate their experience, because no two reddit users see the same feed, even on the front page. If the front page does count, Reddit is way worse and casual.
Meanwhile, HackerNews all have the same feed. So it is very much more of a single community, under a single (or a few?) moderators.
The last bit of your comment seems to imply you think what I'm talking about is something I'm making up somehow?
I'll also quote a Hacker News Guideline that's good to follow because this isn't the first time this has occurred between us:
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I don't appreciate an attempt to start a conversation on whether or not to classify reddit as a community or a "community of communities", and instead be assumed that I'm denying lived experiences.
Clarification: Reddit has a lot more general cynicism about mundane topics (hence my examples), but depending on your above definition you can argue that it is overall less "toxic" than HackerNews. Toxicity here referring more to topics that harm on a personal level. You can very easily get into heated arguments over mundane topics on Reddit and that can be aggrevating, but it may be argued to not be "toxic".
Meanwhile, HN is a lot more focused on tech, and while the mundane can be heated, the site usually does a good job at moderating flame wars, no matter the topic. HN is very anti flame bait, so it won't allow that to persist to begin with.
But, it can indeed have a blind eye towards casual toxicity, because it's not as easy to probe as "Lol Women, amirite?". Even if people agreed on HN, it'd be flagged just because it's a low effort comment (to use Tildes' equivalent, it'd be marked as "noise" as opposed to "malice"). The language on HN is much closer to Tildes in that regard, but moderation styles are very different.
I can't read your mind, and no one's reading comprehension is perfect. I'm sorry if my impression of your comment was inaccurate but I wasn't being deliberately uncharitable. That's what the...
I don't appreciate an attempt to start a conversation on whether or not to classify reddit as a community or a "community of communities", and instead be assumed that I'm denying lived experiences.
I can't read your mind, and no one's reading comprehension is perfect. I'm sorry if my impression of your comment was inaccurate but I wasn't being deliberately uncharitable. That's what the comment seemed to be saying to me, and I apologize for the genuine misunderstanding if that's not what you meant.
I don't regularly browse HackerNews. And I'm definitely not going to absolve Reddit of its own misogyny and transphobia problems -- to say nothing of its many other issues. But I've seen enough misogyny and transphobia just in the comments of HN threads I've been linked to from here (and not exclusively on what should be controversial topics, sometimes just bc someone with the wrong gender dared to write a blog post) to be confident in my assessment of HackerNews. If I've seen enough to turn me off solely through being linked to it from an external site, there's absolutely enough there that I have no interest in becoming a regular user.
You're right about Reddit's front page being worse than a more curated experience, and I agree that it's hard to really classify Reddit as a community or a set of communities. That said, I found that most of the mainstream subreddits (i.e., stuff frequently on the front page) I followed weren't too inundated when I got to them -- perhaps some of this was selection bias, but I'm sure some was active moderation. There were absolutely exceptions (TwoXChromosomes was absolutely overrun by misogynists arguing in almost any thread ever since it was made a default sub, for instance) but the ability to unsubscribe from particularly toxic subreddits is, I think, a boon to Reddit's overall structure when it comes to avoiding toxic content. There's no equivalent to leaving a toxic subreddit and making a new subreddit with better moderation on HackerNews -- you'd have to make your own site.
I don't browse Reddit much anymore either, to be clear. I'm more happy with the moderation here. But I don't think it's a coincidence that my limited forays into HackerNews have left me with a poor opinion of the site's culture. I think you're probably right that the site's treatment of casual toxicity is probably the reason for that -- I'd definitely have a different view of the site if comments like that were deleted rather than heavily "downvoted".
That's my experience as well. On the whole it's more rational and constructive than the internet average. It's far from perfect, there are a frustrating (but not overwhelming) amount of ego driven...
That's my experience as well. On the whole it's more rational and constructive than the internet average.
It's far from perfect, there are a frustrating (but not overwhelming) amount of ego driven posts and a small but noticeable demographic of people looking for intellectual dunks, which I chalk up to the high percentage of young(ish) male tech bros. That makes it less welcoming than many places but it also keeps the noise level down, HN is merciless to posts that don't add value.
One point in HN's favor is that in any thread about a specific tech, science or engineering topic, there's a really good chance of genuine domain expert posters, and a good chance those posts will be heavily upvoted.
I wish these gents nothing but peace and kindness and good things to come. Moderation is a thankless and soul crushing job when the community doesn't agree with the necessity or the importance of...
The important question is, what’s the best way to handle it if we want to have an internet forum that doesn’t suck? Experience teaches that the answer is: the patient supply of correct information by people who do know about a topic.
I wish these gents nothing but peace and kindness and good things to come. Moderation is a thankless and soul crushing job when the community doesn't agree with the necessity or the importance of its moderation. On the other site I've seen sub-communities that clearly crowd around their mods and cherish them and help them with their jobs: for better and for worse actually, since they could be crowding around terrible people moderating to maintain terrible ideologies. But it seems to make the mods happier. I've also seen places where they resent and resist moderators with a constant flurry of "well I didn't vote for you".
As for the quote from Gackle at the end of the article, I want to applaud his patience, and wish him and Bell every happiness at their job. Personally I think it takes more than patience and correct information: a cold bureaucracy where things are always meticulously correct, with threads tirelessly pointing out every informational flaw can still be a kind of hell. Their jobs are nearly impossible if people primarily go to HN to brag, to be right, to one up, to out shine, to "um ackshually" one another.
It's sadly ironic that the pair failed out of the boisterous, brag hard startup culture only to end up caring for that very kind of crowd.
I honestly wonder if the right way to be a moderator of any forum is to simply ban anyone who complains about moderation. The trend I have noticed for the longest time is that the more of it I...
I honestly wonder if the right way to be a moderator of any forum is to simply ban anyone who complains about moderation. The trend I have noticed for the longest time is that the more of it I see, the worse the community is. Of course, if one just starts to do that out of the blue, you'll have an insurrection on your hands, so it has to be a day-one expectation.
Ehhhhhhh that would only work if the mods are good and a lot of complaints about them are accurate. There are tons and tons of power-tripping douchebags, just as there are a lot who genuinely want...
Ehhhhhhh that would only work if the mods are good and a lot of complaints about them are accurate. There are tons and tons of power-tripping douchebags, just as there are a lot who genuinely want to see the community prosper. I can think of some subreddits where the mods used to be one of the highlights of the community, but the new mods are self-centered and follow their own rules more than the actual subreddit rules. Plenty of great subreddits exist because of users emigrating due to e.g. racist mods, and I know of one mod who really went too far for a long time as though she was defending the last bastion of intellectuality when it was really just a silly "what if?" subreddit. Now it's much more fun and you aren't likely to be banned for a slightly OOC comment.
When I was a mod of a local hobby group, we had strict rules about staying on-topic. That, of course, meant a strict ban on public complaints about moderation. Those posts were inevitably a...
When I was a mod of a local hobby group, we had strict rules about staying on-topic. That, of course, meant a strict ban on public complaints about moderation. Those posts were inevitably a lightning rod for uncivil behavior from previously respected community members. More so than petty name-calling, they attracted people to rant about long-settled community norms—both those who were bitter their faction lost and wanted an appeal to the court of public opinion and those who won but were salty they didn't win big enough.
It's a fast way to build an echo chamber if that's what you're shooting for. People don't always agree on what is out of line. If you just want a bunch of people who all agree A is the only...
I honestly wonder if the right way to be a moderator of any forum is to simply ban anyone who complains about moderation.
It's a fast way to build an echo chamber if that's what you're shooting for. People don't always agree on what is out of line. If you just want a bunch of people who all agree A is the only option, sure.
Personally, the absolute worst communities i've been a part of have had this rule. It's all benevolent tyrant, but boy does this mindset seem to attract the angry. And this was with someone who was, in their eyes, trying.
archive.md isn't working for me, so here's a mirror of the mirror: https://archive.ph/czYVG p.s. archive.is has been having lots of issues lately too, which is why I generally don't use it...
p.s. archive.is has been having lots of issues lately too, which is why I generally don't use it anymore... but I've found archive.ph to be pretty fast and reliable.
One tip is that if you have uBlock Origin installed (you should), disabling Javascript often works to bypass paywalls. Entering reader mode acts similarly.
One tip is that if you have uBlock Origin installed (you should), disabling Javascript often works to bypass paywalls. Entering reader mode acts similarly.
Bypass Paywalls Clean for Chrome and Firefox work wonders too... but I purposely avoid using them or any other bypass methods so I can know which articles are actually paywalled and then provide...
Exemplary
Bypass Paywalls Clean for Chrome and Firefox work wonders too... but I purposely avoid using them or any other bypass methods so I can know which articles are actually paywalled and then provide mirrors for other people here. ;)
How much time do you spend per day doing that? It often takes long enough that I completely forget what I was doing by the time it finishes, but maybe it is easier for someone with less executive...
How much time do you spend per day doing that? It often takes long enough that I completely forget what I was doing by the time it finishes, but maybe it is easier for someone with less executive dysfunction.
Thankfully, the vast majority of the time a mirror already exists on archive.today/.is/.ph/.md/etc. so it just points me to that, and I copy/paste it here. But occasionally I'm the first to...
Exemplary
Thankfully, the vast majority of the time a mirror already exists on archive.today/.is/.ph/.md/etc. so it just points me to that, and I copy/paste it here. But occasionally I'm the first to request a mirror of an article, so it needs to create one, which can take anywhere from 5-30min depending on the queue. I usually just leave the tab open, check back on it later, and post it when it's done. But other than the waiting, which isn't really wasted time since I do other things while it's working, I probably only spend 10-15 min every day clicking through all the topics, hunting for mirrors when the source is paywalled, and posting them here. So it's not too much trouble to do, and I don't mind doing it.
p.s. Topic tagging takes up way more time, and requires way more effort since I have to read (or at least skim) the submitted articles first. Which is why I genuinely appreciate when people make the effort to include some basic tags when they submit something. And why I especially appreciate @mycketforvirrad's tireless work in that regard, since 90% of the time they've already tagged all the topics before I even see them, and I only have to occasionally help pick up the slack when they're AFK. ;) They're the unsung hero of Tildes, IMO.
I used to have a better view of HN moderation, it felt much like the aims here, plus a politics ban. But it feels like the site has shifted and a lot of right wing talking points are not being seen as politics and being permitted while complaints about companies' activities are still being flagged to death.
Like just the other day there was a defense of a well known harassment site on the front page, dang was even participating in the thread so it's not like they were unaware.
AFAIK, flags are set by the community reports most of the time. Dang can override that, but they don't usually flag themselves (they can simply remove comments if it gets too bad). Even if overridden, a lot of that will still be downvoted to oblivion if certain crowds are present. It's no different from Reddit in that regard.
KF?
IIRC, yes.
As someone with a long career in tech, but firmly outside the techbro-isphere, that pretty much sums it up for me.
That's a little surprising to me. Personally I'd rank it as less toxic than the "background radiation" level of the internet - like Reddit and other social media sites.
In the "techbro-isphere" TeamBlind is by far the worst I've seen.
In my experience it's worse than the most mainstream subreddits if you're a woman or queer, especially once you scroll down in the comments. Any topic relating to "diversity" is a shitshow. Reddit has worse places, but you have to go hunting for them, and it has far better places too.
I've never heard of TeamBlind, and given your description I think I'm safe steering clear lol
TeamBlind is a site where you have to verify your employee email domain. This puts a little brand logo next to your posts. Almost every post is ended with your total compensation, ex: "TC: 450k", whether it's relevant or not. And there's this small level of illusion here because your employer is verified by the site, but your TC is not. So people can say whatever they want for TC with the implication that it's more true than it would be on another site.
People will post things like: "How can I buy a wife? TC: 500k" Basically it's all a dick measuring contest, patriarchy boiled down to its tech-bro-iest refined state. Occasionally there's some mildly racist stuff there because the wrong type of immigrants are getting too many positions in some company.
ah lovely, that sounds toxic in a totally different way than I even expected.
Human buying, or even human labour buying comments can pop up in web sub cultures where wealth and privilege are flaunted or just taken for granted.....I remember being part of a baby/parenting forum that regularly featured wealth flaunting threads talking about purchasing human labour in uncomfortable ways....
From this article, a comment by the proprietor of NGate about HN culture:
Would you say that having the compensation be part of every post make TeamBlind even more focused on the American Psycho-ness of its money crazed users? What was the origin nap justification for even having that number instead of say, job title?
To be clear, it’s not a TC field you fill out. It’s like a signature users type out after the body of their comments. Thus it’s a result of the pre-existing culture in tech and not a direction provided by the website.
Oh I see, thank you for the added info. What a curious pre existing culture
Come on, it can't be that ba-
https://www.teamblind.com/post/Homosexuality-%5BDI-poll%5D-6DmMgOQG
Any time I’ve gone to that site I leave in a fit of rage after 5 minutes.
It doesn't make it much better, but there's a very conservative international audience on Blind. It's very different from Hacker News. There's a reason there are so many in-jokes on Blind about anon commenters named Rajesh remaining forever single etc...
I don't think that makes it any better at all?
It doesn't. Just provides more context on where some of the weirdness comes from. It's unlikely to come from white tech bros in San Francisco. Blind has a lot of bitter commenters that want a visa to Canada, America, or Europe, and many of them incorrectly think their opportunity was stolen by a DEI hire.
I don't actually think the participants in Blind and HN are that far apart, just a mix of some people are straight up trolling on Blind in a way that would get moderated on HN, and a different site culture leading to a much more mask off approach from people who genuinely think that way.
From my experience it’s derived from the unearned position of wealth and power given to young men. There is skill and effort involved in getting a high paid position in a major tech company. But does it compare to what’s required to get $500k/year in any other industry? No. It’s the easiest way to get rich - if you’re lucky.
So there’s a gap here where guys come to the conclusion that they’re just amazing and believe it’s all deserved. Sure you’re great at being a cog in the corporate machine, write good Java and can excel on a leetcode interview. In my opinion that doesn’t mean you’re better than other people. But if you do fall for this mental trap you equate your income with your value as a human. And those with less income have less value of course.
The tech salaries in the US seem pretty crazy to me. $500k would be CEO type money for a medium size company here in most of Europe. Would be rare to see regular engineers at above 150k. Though taking in the living cost of living in San Francisco they might not be so rich.
The only thing I can compare it to is young men getting rich by stock or crypto (or inheritance) and that can easily lead to that kind of behavior.
Not super important, but the $500k number would be about half salary, half stock, and a little bonus as well.
In addition to this, the impression I get from being in the industry (though I could be wrong, it doesn’t come up in discussion a ton) is that that the majority of devs will never achieve total comp this high, with most instead getting stuck somewhere significantly below that mark or moving into management or changing professions first.
Yes, you’d need to be at one of a few companies that pay this high and make it into a senior role. But even a mid level engineer at Google can make over $300k.
There's a reason several bloggers I follow will say "oh no my post is on the orangesite frontpage" or things like that.
Several bloggers I follow have tried to implement technical measures to block HN users from viewing their content, that typically just makes HN more antagonistic about it. Not just the users, either, HN itself has implemented countermeasures against the blocks.
A common remark I find on HN are complaints about the author of some blog with a specific target audience, not explaining the things that that audience can be expected to know, because it means the HN audience need to build their own context. I think there's a real expectation by some users on HN that the articles are written for the HN audience, rather than being written by one person for that person's audience and then shared by (a potentially different) someone to HN later.
A similar trend that I've seen is people who can't seem to distinguish between "clickbait" and "a narrative with a hook" - the HN audience in particular often has a low tolerance for the style of article that's written as an exploration of the process the author went through.
To be fair I don’t skim HN for reading about diversity, but about technologies.
It's a bit distracting to read about technology with misogyny and transphobia strewn about the comments section. Technology exists in a society, so it's impossible to avoid those topics ever being even tangentially related.
I feel like the problem (read: not a problem with you specifically, just want to point out a shortfall of this kind of thinking) with this is that technology isn't and shouldn't be divorced from diversity, especially in a world so increasingly reliant on it. It's mentioned in the OP article about photography and darker skinned people and how they're not being captured properly, and we've had discussions here on Tildes even about it. If we don't talk about diversity alongside the technology, we run the risk of leaving people behind unfairly.
There is a politics in everything and certainly there is a politics of technology, even more so nowadays that technology is everywhere and tech issues have become mainstream. The problem is that if you take that reasoning too far, everything is connected, nothing is off-topic, and every forum becomes yet another political forum.
To avoid that happening in a specialized forum, you need to be rigorous about treating unrelated politics as off-topic, while still allowing it if it’s directly related. This distinction, about what counts as related politics, can’t be done rigorously - someone needs to make a call about a nebulous boundary.
Hacker News is a forum with very nebulous boundaries on what subjects are on-topic. They once tried to be strictly no-politics for a week and found that they couldn’t do it due to there being no agreement about what counts. Topics will still get flagged if people don’t see a technology angle, though.
I think lobste.rs has done better at being strictly no-politics but I don’t read it much and couldn’t really say. It turns out that if you remove the politics, it’s kind of boring?
Sure, but I feel like a quick eye test isn't necessarily difficult (maybe in my very cherry-picked examples, at least). I don't think an American style Biden v Trump should be the predominant conversation in every conversation about AI, but if you say that "minorities have to do something different to get the same results using the same technology" is political, you end up in the same line of thinking of people screaming about politics that women, trans people, and minorities simply existing is "political".
Maybe that's why I wouldn't be a good moderator though, in that position I'd just ban people on sight for that lol.
I think that is a political concern, but it's a politics we care about, and closely related to the technology and how it's used.
Sorry, I don't follow. Did you reply to the wrong comment? What I'm saying is that discussion purely about tech, which should be for everyone, should consider everyone their target audience. The two examples I made are for digital photography and AI and how they unfairly treat certain groups of people, which should be discussed in tech groups if people insist that tech is for everyone.
A potential reading of this comment in the context of the larger conversation is that women and trans people, even those interested in or working in tech, are not the target audience of HN and should accept that the forum will contain casual misogyny and transphobia in the comments because they don't belong there in the first place.
I don't think this is a charitable reading, so I'm trying not to assume it's what you meant, but I'm having trouble parsing what else you're trying to say here.
I don't think it's actually possible for me to coherently respond to this comment without getting heated. I think the idea that women and trans people should just "accept that they're not the target audience" of websites full of misogyny and transphobia and thus they have no right to criticize their toxicity actually abhorrent.
I suppose it depends on if you think the front page is a "community" or just an amalgamation of Reddit as a whole. Reddit these days has am uncanny ability to make any topic on the front page some controversy. Animal video? Someone is being abused somehow. Random moment of pain? Why was the camera person just sitting there?
Guess it depends on if you are basing this on pure cynicism or a group that truly believes they are oppressed.
I was specifically talking about the general treatment of women and trans people in comments -- not necessarily just controversial topics popping up, but what kind of response you could generally expect if women or trans people came up in the comments (whether relevant to the main topic or not).
The last bit of your comment seems to imply you think what I'm talking about is something I'm making up somehow? I'm talking about the experiences I've had reading comments on both sites.
I was simply asking for clarification is if you consider The Front page of Reddit to be a "community". It isn't very hard for me to find any topic on Reddit's front page with a woman in any capacity and find sexism. But that wouldn't be fair to users who highly curate their experience, because no two reddit users see the same feed, even on the front page. If the front page does count, Reddit is way worse and casual.
Meanwhile, HackerNews all have the same feed. So it is very much more of a single community, under a single (or a few?) moderators.
I'll also quote a Hacker News Guideline that's good to follow because this isn't the first time this has occurred between us:
I don't appreciate an attempt to start a conversation on whether or not to classify reddit as a community or a "community of communities", and instead be assumed that I'm denying lived experiences.
Clarification: Reddit has a lot more general cynicism about mundane topics (hence my examples), but depending on your above definition you can argue that it is overall less "toxic" than HackerNews. Toxicity here referring more to topics that harm on a personal level. You can very easily get into heated arguments over mundane topics on Reddit and that can be aggrevating, but it may be argued to not be "toxic".
Meanwhile, HN is a lot more focused on tech, and while the mundane can be heated, the site usually does a good job at moderating flame wars, no matter the topic. HN is very anti flame bait, so it won't allow that to persist to begin with.
But, it can indeed have a blind eye towards casual toxicity, because it's not as easy to probe as "Lol Women, amirite?". Even if people agreed on HN, it'd be flagged just because it's a low effort comment (to use Tildes' equivalent, it'd be marked as "noise" as opposed to "malice"). The language on HN is much closer to Tildes in that regard, but moderation styles are very different.
I can't read your mind, and no one's reading comprehension is perfect. I'm sorry if my impression of your comment was inaccurate but I wasn't being deliberately uncharitable. That's what the comment seemed to be saying to me, and I apologize for the genuine misunderstanding if that's not what you meant.
I don't regularly browse HackerNews. And I'm definitely not going to absolve Reddit of its own misogyny and transphobia problems -- to say nothing of its many other issues. But I've seen enough misogyny and transphobia just in the comments of HN threads I've been linked to from here (and not exclusively on what should be controversial topics, sometimes just bc someone with the wrong gender dared to write a blog post) to be confident in my assessment of HackerNews. If I've seen enough to turn me off solely through being linked to it from an external site, there's absolutely enough there that I have no interest in becoming a regular user.
You're right about Reddit's front page being worse than a more curated experience, and I agree that it's hard to really classify Reddit as a community or a set of communities. That said, I found that most of the mainstream subreddits (i.e., stuff frequently on the front page) I followed weren't too inundated when I got to them -- perhaps some of this was selection bias, but I'm sure some was active moderation. There were absolutely exceptions (TwoXChromosomes was absolutely overrun by misogynists arguing in almost any thread ever since it was made a default sub, for instance) but the ability to unsubscribe from particularly toxic subreddits is, I think, a boon to Reddit's overall structure when it comes to avoiding toxic content. There's no equivalent to leaving a toxic subreddit and making a new subreddit with better moderation on HackerNews -- you'd have to make your own site.
I don't browse Reddit much anymore either, to be clear. I'm more happy with the moderation here. But I don't think it's a coincidence that my limited forays into HackerNews have left me with a poor opinion of the site's culture. I think you're probably right that the site's treatment of casual toxicity is probably the reason for that -- I'd definitely have a different view of the site if comments like that were deleted rather than heavily "downvoted".
That's my experience as well. On the whole it's more rational and constructive than the internet average.
It's far from perfect, there are a frustrating (but not overwhelming) amount of ego driven posts and a small but noticeable demographic of people looking for intellectual dunks, which I chalk up to the high percentage of young(ish) male tech bros. That makes it less welcoming than many places but it also keeps the noise level down, HN is merciless to posts that don't add value.
One point in HN's favor is that in any thread about a specific tech, science or engineering topic, there's a really good chance of genuine domain expert posters, and a good chance those posts will be heavily upvoted.
It hasn't been updated in years, but I used to like reading the n-gate reviews of HN threads to balance out the tech-bro enthusiasm on HN.
I've never discovered a website that is likely to make me sympathetic to Hacker News until now, so that's an achievement
OMG, I wish I had not missed that when it was active. The about page is hilarious.
I wish these gents nothing but peace and kindness and good things to come. Moderation is a thankless and soul crushing job when the community doesn't agree with the necessity or the importance of its moderation. On the other site I've seen sub-communities that clearly crowd around their mods and cherish them and help them with their jobs: for better and for worse actually, since they could be crowding around terrible people moderating to maintain terrible ideologies. But it seems to make the mods happier. I've also seen places where they resent and resist moderators with a constant flurry of "well I didn't vote for you".
As for the quote from Gackle at the end of the article, I want to applaud his patience, and wish him and Bell every happiness at their job. Personally I think it takes more than patience and correct information: a cold bureaucracy where things are always meticulously correct, with threads tirelessly pointing out every informational flaw can still be a kind of hell. Their jobs are nearly impossible if people primarily go to HN to brag, to be right, to one up, to out shine, to "um ackshually" one another.
It's sadly ironic that the pair failed out of the boisterous, brag hard startup culture only to end up caring for that very kind of crowd.
I honestly wonder if the right way to be a moderator of any forum is to simply ban anyone who complains about moderation. The trend I have noticed for the longest time is that the more of it I see, the worse the community is. Of course, if one just starts to do that out of the blue, you'll have an insurrection on your hands, so it has to be a day-one expectation.
Ehhhhhhh that would only work if the mods are good and a lot of complaints about them are accurate. There are tons and tons of power-tripping douchebags, just as there are a lot who genuinely want to see the community prosper. I can think of some subreddits where the mods used to be one of the highlights of the community, but the new mods are self-centered and follow their own rules more than the actual subreddit rules. Plenty of great subreddits exist because of users emigrating due to e.g. racist mods, and I know of one mod who really went too far for a long time as though she was defending the last bastion of intellectuality when it was really just a silly "what if?" subreddit. Now it's much more fun and you aren't likely to be banned for a slightly OOC comment.
When I was a mod of a local hobby group, we had strict rules about staying on-topic. That, of course, meant a strict ban on public complaints about moderation. Those posts were inevitably a lightning rod for uncivil behavior from previously respected community members. More so than petty name-calling, they attracted people to rant about long-settled community norms—both those who were bitter their faction lost and wanted an appeal to the court of public opinion and those who won but were salty they didn't win big enough.
It's a fast way to build an echo chamber if that's what you're shooting for. People don't always agree on what is out of line. If you just want a bunch of people who all agree A is the only option, sure.
Personally, the absolute worst communities i've been a part of have had this rule. It's all benevolent tyrant, but boy does this mindset seem to attract the angry. And this was with someone who was, in their eyes, trying.
TL;DR it's a feature in the New Yorker on the Hacker News moderator(s)
Archive link
archive.md isn't working for me, so here's a mirror of the mirror:
https://archive.ph/czYVG
p.s. archive.is has been having lots of issues lately too, which is why I generally don't use it anymore... but I've found archive.ph to be pretty fast and reliable.
One tip is that if you have uBlock Origin installed (you should), disabling Javascript often works to bypass paywalls. Entering reader mode acts similarly.
Bypass Paywalls Clean for Chrome and Firefox work wonders too... but I purposely avoid using them or any other bypass methods so I can know which articles are actually paywalled and then provide mirrors for other people here. ;)
How much time do you spend per day doing that? It often takes long enough that I completely forget what I was doing by the time it finishes, but maybe it is easier for someone with less executive dysfunction.
Thankfully, the vast majority of the time a mirror already exists on archive.today/.is/.ph/.md/etc. so it just points me to that, and I copy/paste it here. But occasionally I'm the first to request a mirror of an article, so it needs to create one, which can take anywhere from 5-30min depending on the queue. I usually just leave the tab open, check back on it later, and post it when it's done. But other than the waiting, which isn't really wasted time since I do other things while it's working, I probably only spend 10-15 min every day clicking through all the topics, hunting for mirrors when the source is paywalled, and posting them here. So it's not too much trouble to do, and I don't mind doing it.
p.s. Topic tagging takes up way more time, and requires way more effort since I have to read (or at least skim) the submitted articles first. Which is why I genuinely appreciate when people make the effort to include some basic tags when they submit something. And why I especially appreciate @mycketforvirrad's tireless work in that regard, since 90% of the time they've already tagged all the topics before I even see them, and I only have to occasionally help pick up the slack when they're AFK. ;) They're the unsung hero of Tildes, IMO.