
Ask HN: Does dang read every HN comment? - johnwheeler
Can you give us an idea of what percentage of content on HN you typically consume in a day? Is it 100%, 50%?
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gus_massa
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sctb](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sctb)
is also a moderator and there is a undisclosed number of hidden semi-
moderator, and some automatic filters and scripts, and enough flags from users
can kill a bad story. So I guess 20%.

If you see something too bad or too good, you can send an email to the mods:
hn@ycombinator.com They usually reply soon, but it is a manual process, so use
it wisely.

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gitgud
The recent post [1] "The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News", should shed
some light on how he moderates.

If you go to the [2] Algolia API, and filter "Comments in the last 24 hours".
There's around 8,000 results. It's not really possible to keep track of that
many comments and conversations (if he is a human that is).

My guess is that the moderation tools help him monitor for content that needs
urgent attention, to keep the community and discussion healthy... so my final
answer ~10% (1,000 comments per day)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052)

[2]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=last24h&type=comment)

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quickthrower2
Not physically impossible, 24h a day thousands of comments s day. I imagine
grep or similar is used to find bad comments.

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ben_jones
Depends if he consumes it through the website or has a reader or stream-like
view. I'm imagining a twitter like feed that could elevate controversial
comments to his immediate attention.

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smileypete
Moderation will always need the human touch, but it seems to be ripe for some
sort of ai or graphing tool to help identify where it's likely to be needed.

All thanks to dang and sctb anyway. :)

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1123581321
Based on his admiration of Metafilter’s moderation and how much has been
written in Metatalk about how their moderation works I’d say he spends a lot
of time responding to flags and emailed notes, watches new and some special
lists/views, and maybe keeps open the few threads he intuits to be contentious
(possibly with access to a linear view of comments being added to an article,
and extra metadata appearing?)

Good, efficient moderation requires internal tooling and view development.

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jrcii
He checks every comment and submission to ensure no one is making a political
statement against his leftist agenda that he disagrees with so he knows who
needs to be silenced. Kind of like a digital Stalin, whom I’m sure he looks up
to.

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HNLurker2
Yes

