Just for clarity's sake: I spent a year monitoring HN (somewhat primitively, but with automation) for white nationalist content, and I stopped because it's become increasingly clear that the site itself finds white nationalism repugnant.
Though it's not explicitly stated in the guidelines (the guidelines would be long indeed if they had to state every pathology that emerges on an Internet message board), it's abundantly clear from the "informal moderation log" (the feed of comments from 'dang) that overt appeals to racial, national, or religious superiority are against the site rules. People are routinely banned for this stuff.
It's also just pretty clear that the community on the site has much less patience for racism and misogyny than the rap it gets on Twitter (which is an objectively worse site, for whatever that's worth). The real reason monitoring for white nationalism got boring is that practically every comment I'd catch would get modded down and flagged. I used to report things to Dan when I saw them, but I was batting less than .200 on reporting things that weren't flagged by the time Dan saw them.
What's problematic about evaluating the site --- and you don't have this problem, because you're a regular, but lots of other people do --- is it can be extraordinarily bad if you snapshot it at the wrong time. Anyone can join! Without a credit card or a phone number! They can post whatever nonsense they want! You have to watch the site in action over the course of hours to see what the community actually thinks about something. That's plenty of time to make an effective Orange Site Dunk on Twitter.
I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable, and there must be room to improve it. But it's better than a lot of people think it is.
> I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable, and there must be room to improve it. But it's better than a lot of people think it is.
This is basically my position. I have a hard time convincing others of it because of the reputation, though. It’s been an invaluable space for me in learning from people like you posting and I have no doubt that I have gained a significant amount of social savvy and also technological sophistication in using the site. I have trouble thinking of specific ways that it could be improved, specifically because of what you mention.
It's hard! Like, I don't think it's reasonable to say "the site needs 6 more Dans" because it's hard enough to find one Dan that no other site like HN has managed to accomplish it.
I appreciate you sticking through it, though. I know this place can get hard to take.
Part of it is a flip side of hiding comment scores. I think it's helped, but it also means that horrible comments that are too young to have been modded down yet are just as prominent as comments that the community agrees with. (If not more, due to the comment-order-semi-randomizer.)
One thing I have noticed in that vein is that it's impossible to tell whether a particular thread of comments is representative of a commonly held viewpoint, or if it's one commenter with an axe to grind. And if it's one commenter, they may have an entirely valid axe to grind! And then, even if it is valid, that axe may be totally off-topic for the post and dominate the conversation, retreading tired old ground and sucking up all the air in the room for interesting, relevant, new conversation. (Collapsable threading helps a lot though.)
Check the post time. If it's only a few minutes old, it's likely it just hasn't been seen by other people yet.
You'd be a good hitter batting .200 in the majors. I don't think reporting an additional 2 egregious comments for every 8 that have that have already been flagged, downvoted, and / or otherwise dealt with is a loss. Unless it's just a matter of "if I wait a little longer, these will get taken care of, too," then I would say continuing your efforts is worthwhile.
You mean, like, compared to a random person picked off the street, right.
After a little research, it seems that "good" is a bit of a stretch. But, the current median batting average in MLB is .248, so you're not really that far off. And, I think it's fair to say that given your other contributions to HN, .200 is enough to be above the "Mendoza line." ;)
Maybe HN is anti-white-nationalism, but there's definitely a lot of ignorance about how the people here are impacting the system. For example look at the comments on this article that talked about paying for the news:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23372570
This kind of ignorance is going to end up making society a worse place. It's not white nationalism, but it's not a lot better either.
Being wrong about journalism is in fact a lot better than being a white nationalist.
Totally agreed.