There's a lot to love and respect about Hacker News, but I must confess that my heart jumped with joy a little bit when I read this:
“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,” he wrote. “They’re people who are convinced that they are too special for rules, and too smart for education. They don’t regard themselves as inhabiting the world the way other people do; they’re secret royalty, detached from society’s expectations and unfailingly outraged when faced with normal consequences for bad decisions. Society, and especially economics, is a logic puzzle where you just have to find the right set of loopholes to win the game. Rules are made to be slipped past, never stopping to consider why someone might have made those rules to start with. Silicon Valley has an ethics problem, and ‘Hacker’ ‘News’ is where it’s easiest to see.”
I also cracked up about the hullabaloo around "Do Elephants Have Souls?" There are so many little tid-bits of evidence that a major problem with Hacker News is that people share their opinions without fully reading/digesting the article.
“The article itself is just this wonderful exploration into the literature around elephants,” Gackle told me. “I don’t know how anybody could read that article and not just go, like, ‘Wow’—I mean, at least if you’re interested in elephants in any way.” Posting under his Hacker News username, dang, he staged a moderate intervention. “All: This article is not about souls,” he wrote. “It’s about elephants, humans, how we relate to elephants, how they relate to us, how humans relate to non-humans.”
That's a very friendly/nice/thoughtful reply, although I wonder if it would have been easier to just say, "If you didn't read the article, please keep your opinion to yourself." :P
Beyond just the question of reading & not reading, this got me really fired up about Readup. I can't wait to have some Eternal September moment(s). Also, I think that the author is 100% right that, "The tech industry as a whole is having its own Eternal September."
I was sad reading this article because it feels like something you'd read again in five years when HN has spun out of control to understand how impossible the job was for the moderators. The detractor's quote was funny. The moderator's reply was earnest. This problem requires completely different approaches. I agree Readup is a good start.
Remember the article we read about moderating Reddit (also The New Yorker) and the one by Paul Graham’s wife about Y Combinator?
Confession: I just went onto Hacker News for the first time. Seems like there’s great opportunity for a partnership between HN and Readup: their problem is with the comments section!
I love the part about how their jobs as moderators of an Internet forum have made Gackle and Bell get into communication, sociology, psychotherapy, healing workshops, Indian philosophy. Everything always boils down to being human.
I check HN multiple times per day but reading the comments is exhausting and repetitive. "Performative erudition" hit the nail on the head. I lit up when I read that. I couldn't imagine moderating the site for a living but maintaining the Arc codebase in a team of two sounds pretty awesome.
There's a lot to love and respect about Hacker News, but I must confess that my heart jumped with joy a little bit when I read this:
I also cracked up about the hullabaloo around "Do Elephants Have Souls?" There are so many little tid-bits of evidence that a major problem with Hacker News is that people share their opinions without fully reading/digesting the article.
That's a very friendly/nice/thoughtful reply, although I wonder if it would have been easier to just say, "If you didn't read the article, please keep your opinion to yourself." :P
Beyond just the question of reading & not reading, this got me really fired up about Readup. I can't wait to have some Eternal September moment(s). Also, I think that the author is 100% right that, "The tech industry as a whole is having its own Eternal September."
I was sad reading this article because it feels like something you'd read again in five years when HN has spun out of control to understand how impossible the job was for the moderators. The detractor's quote was funny. The moderator's reply was earnest. This problem requires completely different approaches. I agree Readup is a good start.
Yeah - the detractor's quote was hilarious. I remember actual lol'ing at that. (Communicating via words is hard!)
Ana Wiener rules. I'm so glad she's with The New Yorker now. This is one of my all-time favs: https://readup.com/read/n-1/uncanny-valley
Remember the article we read about moderating Reddit (also The New Yorker) and the one by Paul Graham’s wife about Y Combinator? Confession: I just went onto Hacker News for the first time. Seems like there’s great opportunity for a partnership between HN and Readup: their problem is with the comments section! I love the part about how their jobs as moderators of an Internet forum have made Gackle and Bell get into communication, sociology, psychotherapy, healing workshops, Indian philosophy. Everything always boils down to being human.
We need to get “Do Elephants Have Souls?” on Readup: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/do-elephants-have-souls
https://readup.com/comments/thenewatlantiscom/do-elephants-have-souls---the-new-atlantis
!!
Omg. It's 127 minutes. And Jeff read it.
Jeff's crushin' it. Also, this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/cw8ka2/readup_a_social_reading_platform_like_reddit_but/
Lulz. Just tried to star it on iOS and got an error. @jeff squad!
You’re right though. That article sounds crazy good.
Also, 100% re: partnering with HN. I’m going to try to get on their radar right now.
I check HN multiple times per day but reading the comments is exhausting and repetitive. "Performative erudition" hit the nail on the head. I lit up when I read that. I couldn't imagine moderating the site for a living but maintaining the Arc codebase in a team of two sounds pretty awesome.
Dude, write your technical blog post so we can trend it on HN and get these dudes attention and do Y Combinator. That's the new plan.
Damn that last anecdote (re: King Canute) is so damn strong.
“Couch alluder” is such a bizarre insult. What does that even mean?! Regardless, it’s hilarious. Cheers to Anna for using that as the final word.
I seriously want to know if that commenter was a reader.
I also want to know how readerly these two guys are?!