
A Pragmatic Approach to Thorny People Problems - DoreenMichele
https://witnesstodestruction.blogspot.com/p/a-pragmatic-approach-to-thorny-people.html
======
derekbreden
The replies I've seen elsewhere here seem well thought out, and in almost all
cases take consideration of the contents of the article into their responses,
even if not intentionally.

I like what this article says, and would like to support the promotion of it's
content without adding further confounding additional language.

Should I have upvoted the article and said nothing?

P.P.S. This comment could be posted on most things I see on HN without further
editing, and would convey what I feel about them.

~~~
Forge36
I believe you're asking how to best promote this specific content?

It depends on who your target audience is: yourself, strangers, coworkers, or
friends?

If you want others to follow this advice, do those same people use HN? If not,
what approach will help them see this?

Do you want to save it, and your thoughts on the article for later review? I
do this publicly to wrap my head around the problem so I can try to get others
to pick apart my mistakes (though perhaps to not great effect due to echo
chambers).

To your specific post for this thread: does the article pose a question or an
answer? I believing that is trying to answer a question.

To the boring meta part: It's my common approach to upvote without replying
(sometimes I write the post add discard it). I'm not 100% clear on the HN
culture and focus my replies to further the discussion (this being a meta post
feels weird).

Both comments, and upvotes keep a that "alive", having read a few articles due
to the sheer number of responses, I believe higher vested effort increases
likelihood of others investing time (this is true but only of posts, but work
in general).

Onto other articles: I like discussing the topics with data behind them. IBMs
Mac rollout is interesting, but I'm wondering (given the source) if it's a PR
piece.

To the target audience: It depends on if it's me as a recipient for practicing
or me as a vehicle for spreading more humility when working with others
(strangers on the internet).

In this case: I'm going to try to remember and reference this article. I don't
want to share it yet as I haven't practiced it. (with this post being more a
response to your question than the article)

Perhaps the best way to promote this post is living it with intent and sharing
it when others ask how you deal with the problem (hopefully doing so well),
thus directly answering your question: Upvote and thank you for posting so I
could think about this more :)

------
DoreenMichele
For clarity's sake, I was not talking about HN in this remark:

 _> If one person’s presence is derailing the conversation for some reason,
don’t automatically decide they must be the bad guy. The absolute worst thing
you can do is to tell that person to shut up and leave the discussion while
allowing other people to keep attacking them in some way. This includes
everyone rebutting their comments that they are no longer allowed to defend
because they were asked to stop posting._

I belonged to a different forum for a time where that was official mod policy.
Being rate limited, having a comment flagged to death by other users or even
being shadow banned on HN where other users can still vouch for your comments
is not the same as being publicly told to stop participating in X discussion
by a mod and then punished if you dare to defend yourself as others talk all
kinds of trash about you while the mods do nothing about it because they are
fine with some in-crowd group being awful to some out-crowd group and actively
encourage that as a matter of more-or-less official policy.

~~~
dimino
I can tell you, from experience in this very thread, it feels about as shitty.
:/

It's marginalization, fundamentally. A very small group of people (or a single
person) decides to use their power to silence you, tell you how wrong you are,
and tie your hands behind your proverbial back so you can't defend yourself.

Dang supports it, and others join in. I can't tell you how many times I'll be
browsing HN and see my score drop from one page load to the next by exactly as
many points as I have comments in my history that can be downvoted. Or how
many times a comment of mine gets flagged for reasons that have _nothing_ to
do with the HN guidelines.

This forum is broken, and is in _dire_ need of disruption.

~~~
pjc50
Do you have any insight into _why_ this might be happening? I had a look at
your post history and noticed you've posted relatively little this year since
a large gap from 2016.

I generally have a lot of respect for HN mods, it's never an easy job.

~~~
dimino
I usually post from diminoten, but moved to this account to try and figure out
why I was getting downvoted instantly nearly every time I commented, and why I
was losing the same karma as votable posts that I had in the span of seconds
sometimes.

HN is not built to handle dissent. Privileges are based on votes, there are
minimal to no vote protection tools in place, the guidelines are used as
cudgels to beat people who disagree with the popular view, and the moderator
(there's more or less only one, dang) prefers to smokescreen and gaslight
anyone he doesn't like with generic comments that don't follow the very
guidelines he's trying to enforce. Just look at his comment history; it's full
of "This doesn't follow guidelines" without any elaboration, and when he
_does_ elaborate, it's an incredibly cynical and not-generous interpretation
of the comment he's saying isn't acceptable, which is itself a violation of
the HN guidelines, specifically the one about addressing the best form of an
argument.

Most of the problem is the fact that dang is the primary active moderator on
HN. If others were to take over, and he were to be removed or retire, HN would
become substantially better, possibly overnight.

Dang needs to be removed for this site to grow and improve. People think HN is
growing; it is not. The quality people who used to post here are more or less
gone, and HN isn't attracting new quality posters to fill their shoes,
precisely because dang moderates very poorly, which pushes away prospective
high value posters.

The reality is, it's high time for a replacement to HN.

~~~
de_watcher
First rule of the downvotes: "Never talk about the downvotes".

~~~
humanrebar
Seems in bounds for a thread about moderation.

------
foobar_
Can this be solved by fixing the UI somehow? Half the time I don't remember
the guidelines and just go into ranting. The article was definitely eye-
opening, I definitely go for negative attention sometimes, sometimes
unwittingly and sometimes out of spite for the trends I see. I can certainly
see why dang had to remind me a few times about the guidelines. I hate Java
and I can be quite trollish about my hate. Oh well, I guess I should just
concentrate on what I love.

That said I do have a problem with silencing. This problem was solved in
USENET with kill-lists, lists where each user can choose to ignore another
list of users maintained democratically without resorting to a few mods, who
can be benevolent or not. This is how we block spammy ip addresses using the
hosts file! This is a solved problem with a simple solution, heck it can even
be applied to every major social networking site out there.

On a side note, why can't HN code be made available on GitHub? It could be one
of the biggest lisp projects overnight.

~~~
dang
Much of the HN codebase consists of anti-abuse measures that would stop
working if people knew about them. Unfortunately.

There's a very old version of HN that pg published years ago (at
[http://arclanguage.org/](http://arclanguage.org/)). It would be nice to get
that updated and maintained, but separating out the secret parts would by now
be a lot of work. The time to do it will be if and when we eventually release
the alternative Arc implementations we've been working on.

~~~
krapp
>The time to do it will be if and when we eventually release the alternative
Arc implementations we've been working on.

 _implementations?_ plural?

Why not contribute to Anarki, at least the not-entirely-secret-sauce stuff
like thread folding and vouching?

~~~
dang
I'm open to doing that. It would just be a nontrivial amount of work and there
are many nontrivials on the list.

Yes, there's now an Arc-to-JS called Lilt, and an Arc-to-Common Lisp called
Clarc. In order to to make those easier to develop, we reworked the lower
depths of the existing Arc implementation to build Arc up in stages. The
bottom one is called arc0, then arc1 is written in arc0, and arc2 in arc1. The
one at the top (arc2, I think) is full Arc. This isn't novel, but it makes
reimplementation easier since you pack as much as possible in the later
stages, and only arc0 needs to be written in the underlying system (Racket,
JS, or CL).

It also shrank the total Arc implementation by 500 lines or so, which in pg
and rtm-land is a couple enclycopedias' worth of code. That was satisfying,
and also a nice indication of how high-level a language Arc is.

~~~
krapp
There's no rush - it's not the most active community as I'm sure you're aware,
and everyone is probably going to be distracted by Bel for a while.

------
stochastastic
Thanks for writing/sharing this. It puts words around some dynamics I’ve seen,
and not just online. It got me thinking about people and my mental models of
them, which I think is helpful.

------
marcus_holmes
Thanks for writing this, it was genuinely interesting and useful. Particularly
the parts about negative attention and trolls. I've had a "nice" childhood and
don't understand at all how negative attention can be comforting for some
people. It really helped to have that explained.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> So, for example, homeless people and very sick people and disabled people
can join the conversation and their personal problems can be inadvertently
disruptive in a way that’s very hard to deal with both humanely and
effectively.

I feel this is worded extermely clumsimly and it puts people who are homeless,
sick or disabled (!) on the spot for causing trouble.

From my experience on HN and other internet message boards, people who are
healthy and financially well-off can do a fine job of being disruptive and
engaging in flame wars. I don't see the reason to single out homeless, sick or
disabled people as being particularly notable for being disruptive.

------
dimino
> If one person’s presence is derailing the conversation for some reason,
> don’t automatically decide they must be the bad guy. The absolute worst
> thing you can do is to tell that person to shut up and leave the discussion
> while allowing other people to keep attacking them in some way. This
> includes everyone rebutting their comments that they are no longer allowed
> to defend because they were asked to stop posting.

> It is healthier to allow them to vigorously defend their point of view if
> they wish. If they are the only person representing a particular point of
> view or experience, do not act like “they are posting too much” if they
> reply to everyone talking with them about it.

Really wish dang would read this. HN takes the exact opposite approach to this
and dang prefers to enforce this to avoid confrontation rather than create a
space for conversation.

Edit: this is a great example. I can't reply to anyone here, because I'm rate
limited, so people can say how many ways I'm wrong and I have no real ability
to defend my argument. This is what dang wants, and it's incredibly toxic. The
downvotes pour in and I'm helpless.

~~~
saagarjha
> The absolute worst thing you can do is to tell that person to shut up and
> leave the discussion while allowing other people to keep attacking them in
> some way.

Hacker News doesn't let you respond to dead comments, so this isn't true.

~~~
SamReidHughes
You can't vouch it, respond, and then unvouch?

~~~
andrewflnr
Does that work? I guess I assumed vouching just flagged a comment for re-
review, rather than instantly reviving it.

~~~
SamReidHughes
It often does an insta-revive, but I never tested whether you could unvouch
after replying.

