[holler]

Hey dang, first, I appreciate all of your comments in this post and your deep commitment to both HN and the state of online discussion. I'm learning a lot from reading your comments.

I'm curious if given all that you've shared, you think it's even _possible_ to scale a "healthy" discussion site any larger than HN currently is? It's clear that HN's success is in no small part due to the commitment, passion, and active participation of the few moderators. Contrast that with some of the top comments, which describe how toxic Twitter is, and I wonder if there's some sort of limit to effective moderation, or if we just haven't found more scalable solutions to manage millions of humans talking openly online sans toxicity? cheers

[NateEag]

I'm not dang, obviously, but I think it's a testament to his hard work that HN functions even as well as it does.

Most sites its size are far, far worse, I think.

I personally believe that is due to human nature.

I think that is what dang has observed and is trying to articulate - no matter how smart or rigorous or mathematical you are, you still are human and thus subject to the human condition.

One way that manifests is this persuasion that the Other is winning the war (and that there is a war, for that matter).

I take it as almost axiomatic that a site with Twitter's volume cannot be anything but the cesspool it is.

It's too big for a single person to even begin to read a statistically-significant fraction of the content.

That means moderation is a hilariously-stupid concept at that scale. Any team of moderators large enough to do the job will itself suffer the fragmentation and conflicts that online forums do, and find itself unable to agree on what the policies should be, let alone how they should be adapted in contentious cases (and by definition, you only need moderation in contentious cases).

[dang]

I agree with a lot of this, but the things you're talking about already apply to HN, so the argument can't really be used to show that a larger site would necessarily fail to work as well as HN (however 'well' that really is—I'm not making any grand claims here).

For example, the human nature you're talking about is by far the strongest force on HN, and the scale (though tiny compared to Twitter or Facebook or Reddit) is already beyond what one would suppose possible for a forum like this.

[NateEag]

Very good point.

I would agree that HN is far too big for moderation alone to save it, though I hadn't quite put that together when I wrote my first post.

I think pg's original guidelines managed to capture enough of a cultural ideal that much of the original culture has been preserved organically by the users themselves (though I'm not qualified to speak to the culture of the early years, or how much it has changed since then).

You and the other mod(s?) have done a great job of being a guiding hand, and of understanding that it's too big for anything other than a loose guiding hand to be relevant, from a moderation perspective. You can remove things that shouldn't be discussed, show egregious repeat offenders the door, and encourage people to behave well and be restrained (in large part by example).

Twitter is so much vaster, and grew so fast, that even a guiding hand and good founding culture could not hope to save it. I suspect the way its design encourages rapid-fire back-and-forth also really hurts the nature of interaction on the site.

[intended]

Hey, when you say “already beyond what one would suppose possible.” Could you describe it. And to promise that this in good faith - a personal example of when you stood on the precipice and saw the scale of the yawning depths below.

I’ve found that clear vivid examples from people are crucial torch lights which can be shared around to give people a snap shot into what mods feel or witness. This then allows the conversation with non mods to progress faster, since this type of story telling is what people are best optimized to consume.

[dang]

I don't mean anything fancy, just that HN is a large-ish (millions of users, but not tens of millions) completely open, optionally anonymous internet forum, and it's not obvious that one of those could function as well as HN does. When I say "as well", I don't mean "well". This place has tons of problems. But it could be a lot, lot worse, and the null hypothesis would be to expect worse.

I wrote about this a bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23727261. Shirky's famous 2003 essay about internet communities was talking in terms of a few hundred people, and argued that groups can't scale beyond that. HN has scaled far beyond that, and though it is not a group in every sense of that essay, it has retained, let's say, some groupiness. It's not a war of all against all—or at least, not only that.

As we learn more about how to operate it, I'm hoping that we can do more things to encourage positive group dynamics. We shall see. The public tides are very much against it right now, but those can change.

[NateEag]

Oops - s/adapted/adopted/.

[intended]

Not Dang.

No.

We haven’t really found it before the internet (these problems are endemic to human/sentient nature.)

The internet only makes things industrialized.

There are things you can do, that reduce the number of friction points, thus making it possible to self govern

1) narrow topics/purpose - the closer to an objective science the better.

2) no politics, no religion - as far as possible.

3) topic should not be a static/ largely opinion oriented. More goal driven, with progress milestones easily discussed and queried (lose weight, get healthy, ask artists, learn photoshop.)

4) clear and shareable tests to weed out posers - r/badeconomics, askhistory

5) strong moderation.

6) no to little meta Discussions

7) directed paths for self promotion

8) get lucky and have a topic that attracts polite good faith debaters who can identify and eject bad faith actors (the holy grail.)

Each of these options removes or modulates a source of drama. With enough of them removed, you can still get flame wars, but it will be better than necker having done these before.

[dang]

I don't know. I think it might be on the unlikely side of possible, but I don't have any compelling reasons for saying so. It would require a lot of learning, but it's possible to learn. It's hard and wouldn't happen by default though. You'd be attempting to induce a group into functioning in a way that that no group that large has ever done before.

NateEag makes some good points in the sibling comment. You'd have to create the culture at the level of the moderation team, and that's not easy. The way we approach this work on HN has aspects that reach deep into personal life, in a way that I would not feel comfortable requiring of anybody—nor would it work anyhow. If you tried to build such an organization using any standard corporate approach it would likely be a disaster. But maybe it could be done in a different way, or maybe there is an approach that doesn't resemble how we do it on HN.

Would it be possible with the economics of a startup, where the priority has to be growth and/or monetization? Probably less.