[dang]

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar—nationalistic, political, religious, or otherwise (you hit all three here). If you want to say what you think is great about TikTok or creative things people are doing, that's wonderful; please don't pack it with flamebait. That only makes things worse.

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

> I got my HN account locked when I was begging people to

I don't know what "locked" means but that is not at all an accurate description of how HN accounts get moderated.

[mrtksn]

It was rate limited as I was trying to explain why I thought that it was wrong to blok websites and apps.

Okay, I am removing the part about the recent political events. I think it is important and relevant but I get that it is off limits so I won't talk about it.

[dang]

It's not so much "off limits", it's about comment quality. Low-information, high-indignation comments are not what we want here.

As topics become more divisive, comments trend sharply in that direction, so it's important to be mindful of what sort of thread your comment is likely to lead to.

That's why we have this guideline: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[mrtksn]

Thank you for the follow up. I am not trying to push it but I'm failing to understand how I can express my opinions and experience about governments blocking apps and websites. What would make a comment describing what happened in Turkey and asking people to reconsider their support for app and website blocking in the name of claimed greater good a high quality comment?

This is my second time I fail at this. If this is not banned speech or undesired opinion, do you have any tips to improve my comment quality on the issue?

[dang]

Ok, I hear you and believe that you're asking in good faith. Let's break it down:

> TikTok is the greatest creativity tools I've seen in years and I am fascinated

Good, interesting, curious. A great start!

> how people are trying to downplay or outright dismiss it

Veers from curious to indignant. This is the point where things start to go wrong.

> because of their nationalistic or political feelings

Flamebait

> It's like watching fundamentalist trying to preserve their purity

Flamebait escalation

> when their kosher brands are racing to imitate

Double flamebait escalation

> Hearing the "underage girls dancing and lip syncing, no thanks" line

Yet more flamebait

> fills me with a similar rage

Indignation and flamebait

> that I get when I hear some racist stereotype

Flamebait. By the time we reach the end of a comment like this, anyone who was flammable is on fire.

[dang]

I was thinking about this this evening, and thought of another way to explain the "expected value of a thread" concept (or as I sometimes put it: the value of a post is the expected value of the subthread it leads to - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), which is key to HN discussion.

The thing to understand is that HN threads are supposed to be conversations. A conversation isn't a one-way message like, say, a billboard or a PA announcement. It's a two-way or multi-way co-creation. In a community like HN, it's a multi-way co-creation with a very large fanout.

In conversation, to make high-quality comments you have to take other people into account. If you treat your comment only as a vehicle for your own opinions and feelings—if you leave out the relational dimension—then you're not in conversation. (I don't mean you personally, of course; I mean all of us.)

Conversation means being conscious, while speaking or writing, of whom you're talking to and how what you're saying may affect them. In a forum like HN it means being conscious of the range of people you may be affecting. In conversation, your utterances are not your disconnected private domain for you to optimize as you see fit. You're responsible for the effects you have on the conversation.

I know that some people will read this and think: you're censoring me! you're telling me I can't say what I think or feel! you just don't like my opinions! No no no—that's not it at all. In conversation, you do say what you think and feel, modulated by the relational sense. That is, you're guided not only by what you think and feel but also by the effect you are having, or are likely to have, on others. The goal is to have the best conversation we can have. If we get that right as a community, there's room for what everyone thinks and feels.

Look at it this way. When you're in a relationship with someone, do you bluntly blast them with whatever you're thinking and feeling on any sensitive topic between you? Of course you don't—not if you don't want to stay up all night fighting. What do you do instead? You find a way to say what you think and feel while taking into account what they think and feel. You do it genuinely, not faking it, and you find a way to show that you're doing it.

A lot of HN commenters are going to say: "don't tell me I'm in any fucking relationship with these assholes". Actually you are—that's exactly what you are, whether you want to be or not. You showed up at the same time they did. It may be a weakly cohesive relationship—not like protons and neutrons, more like bosons [1]—but relational dynamics still apply.

If that's too strong a metaphor, try this one: conversation is a dance. When you're dancing with someone, do you only take into account how you want to move and where you want to go? Of course not; that would end the dance. And you certainly don't move in a way that is likely to rub them the wrong way—why would you? It wouldn't serve your purpose, which is to have the best dance.

Other commenters will object: how am I supposed to know in advance how my comment is going to land with others? That's impossible! Well, you can't know exactly, and you don't have to. All you have to do is take it into account. If you take that into account and get it wrong, you'll naturally adapt.

There's one other layer to this. We have to take into account not just the others who are present and how our comments may land with them, but also the medium that we're all using. On HN, the medium is the large, public, optionally anonymous internet forum, and this comes with strengths and weaknesses that shape conversation. In communication, what gets communicated is not the original message you think you're sending, but rather the information that actually gets received by other people, and this has less to do with content than we think it does. It has just as much to do with the medium. Don't underestimate this! McLuhan got it right [2]. Internet forum comments are a mile wide, in the sense that you can say whatever you want, no matter how intense or outrageous—and an inch deep, in the sense that they come with almost no context or background that would help others understand where you're coming from.

We don't seem to have figured much out yet about how this medium works or how best to use it, but I think one thing is clear: because internet comments are so low-bandwidth and so stateless, each comment needs to include some signal that communicates its intent. There are plenty of ways to do this—simply choosing one word instead of another may suffice—but the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate [3]. Otherwise, given the lack of context and large fanout that define this medium, if a message can be misunderstood, it will be—and that's a recipe for bad conversation, which is in none of our interests.

Can we really develop this capacity collectively? Hard to say, but I don't think millions of people have to get it. We just need a large enough subset to deeply take this in—enough to affect the culture. Then the culture will replicate.

[1] I don't actually know anything about bosons

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[mrtksn]

I'm very appreciative for the elaborative answer. The lack of it on some platforms that rely on AI or scripted moderation a bit too much is one of my grievances, so a human who reads reasons and provides answers is nothing short of admirable. Thank you so much for the human touch and care in moderation.

I think I get your point but my writing style often includes some degree of provocation to elevate feelings for more lively and less stylised conversation. When I write a statement, I don't mean it as a way to promote an agenda but a way to initialise a debate, I would even write things that I don't believe but are conversation starters.

It's hard to disagree that flamewars are toxic but I also believe that we should not abstain from conversation on topics with direct impact, no matter how divisive they are.

IMHO what makes the conversation low quality are the personal attacks, not general statements describing observation of a behaviour in a community. These statements are actually good starting points to tear down the status quo. They are flimsy in substance as a whole(which is the reason they are not personally offensive) but have great depth when disassembled.

For example "people are trying to downplay or outright dismiss it because of their nationalistic or political feelings" is a device to provoke re-evaluation on what happened recently. There's no reason any individual to be offended and forces the answers to be about the reasons beyond the nationalism and politics because I define these as a bad thing in the statement. It is supposed to bring up the non nationalist, non political reasons for the events by making people cautious of using nationalistic and political arguments. If the non-political and non-nationalistic reasons lack the depth it can change the minds of people who previously did not consider that shallowness.

It's like saying "tell me the reasons you bought a house that are beyond the financial ones". This is more interesting when phrased as "People these days only care about the financial gains when doing a property purchase".

[ladon86]

Dang, I just wanted to say how much I appreciate the work you do here.

I've seen you engage with posters in this way so many times (though this reply is particularly loquacious!).

I'm always struck by how unusual that level of effort is. A typical moderator would probably just hit the 'ban' button and move on.

I do agree that mrtksn seems well-intentioned here, but even in cases where good faith seems unlikely, I've seen you take the time to explain the rules kindly and substantively.

At first glance, trying to educate bad faith posters might seem like an example of PG's "do things that don't scale" maxim. But surprisingly, I think your approach scales pretty well. You may not always succeed in changing the behavior of the poster you're replying to, but your replies have a positive and scalable impact on this community because they role model good behavior to the thousands of other people reading. And that's leadership.

Thanks again.

[ziml77]

What would we do without you dang? I love that you do your best to guide HN into civil, substantive discussions.

The quality of the comments section here is what keeps me coming back. Without guidance, any site that allows comments becomes lower quality the larger it grows. My theory as to why has a few factors, but one of them has to do with a sense of community. The more people feel they are in a community, the more likely they are to make good faith interpretations of others comments and the more likely they are to consider the effect of what they're saying on others.

Thank you for doing your best to ensure that this feels as much like a community as possible!

[NicoJuicy]

Damn Dang, you seriously went all out to explain, even after all those years.

Hats off