[lidHanteyk]

Another "bad actor" here. I think that it's a combination of two phenomena:

* I have accounts not just here, but also at places like Lobsters and Something Awful. In those places, because accounts are rare and can be banned so easily, discourse is constantly trying to stay much more civil than here or Reddit.

* As a former community moderator, I don't respect moderation actions on sites where anonymous signup is allowed. You asked for hoi polloi to wander in off the street and give their opinions; you can't then wonder why discourse is trash. Here, it's even worse; the moderators are paid for their work, which lends a clear bias to every moderation action. Similar happenings on Reddit led directly to user protests and revolts, and it's amazing that the community tolerates paid moderation here.

The idea of the well-tended garden is a potent one. I have had to tolerate obviously toxic but helpful people before and it is always irritating to not ban them, despite knowing that they are good for the garden.

[dang]

> I don't respect moderation actions on sites where anonymous signup is allowed.

We don't put barriers to signup because we want it to be easy for authors, experts, and people with firsthand knowledge of a situation to step into a thread. Those are some of the best comments HN receives. If you put up barriers to keep out hoi polloi, you end up keeping out the likes of Alan Kay and Peter Norvig too, and plenty of lesser known people who have made first-rate contributions.

Besides that, there are legitimate cases when throwaway accounts are needed in order for a person to post on a topic, often when they have first-hand knowledge of a situation as well. How do you allow that while keeping out trash?

Obviously, if there were a way to allow the above good stuff while keeping out trolls, toxic comments, etc., that'd be grand. But as long as there's a tradeoff, I'd rather have the long tail at both ends—I think the forum would be more mediocre and stale without it.

p.s. I'm puzzled by your comment about paid moderation. It seems to me that unpaid moderation would be more likely to be biased, since people are going to extract compensation for the work in some form or other. If it isn't money, it's probably going to be power or an ideological or personal agenda, or something else that manifests as bias. In any case I'd be curious to hear what sort of bias you think is showing up in mod actions on HN.

[staycoolboy]

> I have had to tolerate obviously toxic but helpful people before

I understand where you are coming from here. I struggle with this. I think there is a legit theory for it, usually given in the context of how to reconcile shitty behavior of geniuses (Picasso comes to mind: legendary artist, shitty human.)

Even if toxic people have something good to say once in a while, do the ends justify the means if they stomp all over the roses in the process?

> You asked for hoi polloi to wander in off the street

The garden analogy is potent because where I live there is a huge rose garden that anyone can wander in off the street and visit. Some people come in and do stamp on the roses. And it sucks for everyone else. Which is why I can understand the desire to keep those people out.

However, shouldn't the gardeners KNOW that there are and always will be shitty humans?

I'm truly ambivalent on this one: I want to participate, but I lack impulse control, so I'm excluded. That's not fair. And if I was tending a garden, I'd want to keep the "me"s out.

[pdonis]

> I want to participate, but I lack impulse control, so I'm excluded. That's not fair.

Yes, it is, because the problem is not the garden, it's you. You want to participate, but you don't have a basic skill (impulse control) that is required for participation. It's like saying you want to be a concert pianist, but you don't know how to play the piano, so you're excluded and that's not fair.

[staycoolboy]

That is why I said I'm ambivalent to the previous comment's statement about benefits from toxic personalities.

I think your argument mixes up things you can control (skill) with things you cannot control (impulsivity), if the latter could be controlled it wouldn't be impulsive.

And I admit that is a big gray area. There's a continuum of toxicity online, and there are going to be some moderation rules that are subjective.

Unlike a pianist, I see the argument as more akin to web developers choosing not to implement alternate or semantic constructs which in turn excludes blind people. A visitor can't get better at not being blind. Of course, the analogy breaks down because blind people aren't adding noncritical discourse (aka what one mod may consider "flamebait"), but now we are back to subjectivity and affordance as to what is noncritical. We clearly know how to make the web accessible to blind people, but we don't have a universally clear way to make discourse available to people who sometimes suck at it.

However, I can create as many accounts as I want, so I got that going for me.

[pdonis]

> I think your argument mixes up things you can control (skill) with things you cannot control (impulsivity), if the latter could be controlled it wouldn't be impulsive.

First, we're not talking about a binary distinction; things aren't either "can control" or "can't control". It's a continuum.

Second, if it's really true that you can't control your impulsive behavior, that still doesn't change the fact that that behavior will make it virtually impossible for other people to deal with you in certain contexts. It's still up to you to recognize the impact that your behavior has on others, and to make choices about what you can realistically do or not do--or about how much work you are willing to do or how much risk you are willing to take to be able to participate in certain activities (for example, if it turned out there was a drug that enabled you to control your impulsive behavior, would you take it in order to enable you to do something you wanted to do?).

> I see the argument as more akin to web developers choosing not to implement alternate or semantic constructs which in turn excludes blind people.

Ok, so what "alternate or semantic constructs" could the programmers of HN, for example, put into their code so it won't exclude people who can't control their impulsive behavior?

> we don't have a universally clear way to make discourse available to people who sometimes suck at it.

It's not that we don't have a "universally clear way" to do this. We don't have a way at all. "Sucking at discourse" is simply not something we know how to accommodate for. The only way we know of to deal with it is for the person who sucks at discourse to learn how to not suck at it.

Perhaps at some point we'll have an AI or something similar that can mediate such discussions so all parties can participate. But we don't have anything now.

[posterboy]

Stop making this personal.

> so you are excluded

from what, playing the piano? Do you maybe see a connection here to why somebody might not know "how to play the piano"?

Or in other words: A garden without "you" is not really a garden, except in theory, if the proverbial tree makes a sound when nobody can hear it fall. That's a slippery slope argument.

Many people may lack impulse control, but preemptive judgement can't weed them all out. That's one reason why it's "not fair". It's fair to those that have "impulse control", maybe, but it is perhaps unfair that they get to decide what that is, when a moderator might act out of impulse, or experience, all the same. It is however futile to assume that life were just not fair, because then "you" have already lost.

If entry is taken to afford the gate keeper, it is not an open garden anymore, open to the public. At least not if the submission requirements are arbitrary to an uncertain degree. Maybe it's the wrong approach to take that internet discussion is not important and impulse control therefore let down too easily. But then again, the impulse to post or visit at all might be the problem to begin with, as in this post.

Really, who's aspiring to become a concert pianist in this day and age? That's a weak rhyme, unless you meant to imply that the reddit moderator cabal were playing the readers like an instrument.

[pdonis]

> Stop making this personal.

I didn't; the person I responded to did, by using the word "I". They were specifically talking about themselves.

> from what, playing the piano?

From being a concert pianist. Read what I actually wrote.

> It's fair to those that have "impulse control", maybe, but it is perhaps unfair that they get to decide what that is, when a moderator might act out of impulse, or experience, all the same.

My statement that impulse control is a basic requirement for participation applies just as much to moderators as to any other participants.

Who gets to decide what the forum rules and norms are is whoever owns the forum. That's as fair as it gets.

There are some forums where lack of impulse control isn't much of a problem, because nobody else on that forum has it either. So strictly speaking, I should have restricted my comments to forums where that is not the case. I don't think that makes much difference in practice for this discussion, since as far as I can tell the forums where lack of impulse control is the norm don't have moderation problems since they don't have moderation at all.

> who's aspiring to become a concert pianist in this day and age?

Googling "how to become a concert pianist" gets plenty of hits, so it looks like plenty of people are trying to help aspiring concert pianists. Perhaps they're all speaking to an audience of zero, but I doubt it.

> unless you meant to imply that the reddit moderator cabal were playing the readers like an instrument

You're going way off into left field here.

[lidHanteyk]

Let's finish the analogy. Rose gardens and other community parks are usually community-funded; my local gardens are funded with taxes. There are not only paid moderators (police), but paid curators (gardeners and arborists) who deliberately build up and cultivate an appearance for the garden. Some of the more expensive gardens, like the local zoo, also have an entrance fee, because taxes alone would not fund the garden at its given size and occupancy.

There are communities like this; Something Awful is the first which comes to mind. These communities deliberately acknowledge that money is required to fund community spaces, and use the money to improve the space.

There are also extensions to the analogy. A local park has a bulletin board. Postings to this board are generally made by community consent; anything that any community member feels strongly enough about can be removed immediately. This is also how postings on telephone poles work. Sometimes a community will lock up their bulletin board after a wave of abusive listings. This is analogous to primitive message board moderation, as seen here on HN.

Are we here to advertise to each other, like on a bulletin board? Are we here to produce a great knowledge base, like in a garden? What should the shape of conversation be?

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

Banning is more like pruning weeds than pulling out weeds.