On: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

[thwythwy]

This reads like a mediocre college admissions essay full of breathless, overdramatic characterizations of minor, anodyne exchanges. I had to stop reading when a two word response from a user gave the author "a small rush of triumph." The tone and word choice is just nauseating. Examples abound: > "Commenters . . . . bickered about the word 'soul.'" > "Conversation spiralled, with users making arguments about Cartesian metaphysics and quoting Socrates."

The interesting aspects of this article could fill a tweet. "1/3 of HN users come from europe. It has mods. They have tatts. Check out @shit_hn_says"

[scott_s → thwythwy]

I'm at a loss at what word choices you object to; people bickered over the world "soul" in that thread, and talked about Cartesian metaphysics and quoted Socrates. Perhaps your real objection is someone else taking their work seriously.

[dang → thwythwy]

One has tatts.

[tptacek → dang]

You know you want "Please don't do this here" on your arm. Maybe in, like, kanji characters or something.

[amyjess → tptacek]

Probably not the best phrase to get done in Japanese. There's no kanji; you'd write all of it in hiragana.

ここでしないでください。 [koko de shinaide kudasai]

Or maybe if you wanted to emphasize the "this": ここでこれをしないでください。 [koko de kore o shinaide kudasai]

[tptacek → amyjess]

Seriously, what's the number we'd have to hit in a charity Kickstarter to make Dan do this?

[pvg → tptacek]

It's been a while since someone's made good use of the HN poll feature.

[intentionalmeta → tptacek]

Please don't do this here.

> Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[scott_s → tptacek]

"Please stop." (Or maybe that was more pg's style.)