Re:Instagram's Million Dollar Bug
by dang on Thursday December 17, 2015 @10:37PM
(#10756456)
> if that request were applied equally whenever HN users were uncivil
That's asking us to operate like machines—supermachines, in fact, with incivility detection and moderation powers. That's unrealistic. HN users' capacity to be uncivil exceeds our capacity to ask them not to, so the latter maxes out.
> it does generally come off as defending specific users
We try hard not to play favorites. I'm biased, of course, but there's more than one kind of bias here. People are more likely to notice us criticizing a comment they identify with than the cases that go the other way. We're biased to notice what we dislike and assign more weight to it.
> Believing this is going to made you a worse moderator
In that case I'm a bad moderator already, because everything I've learned about HN is packed into what I said there.
That's asking us to operate like machines—supermachines, in fact, with incivility detection and moderation powers. That's unrealistic. HN users' capacity to be uncivil exceeds our capacity to ask them not to, so the latter maxes out.
> it does generally come off as defending specific users
We try hard not to play favorites. I'm biased, of course, but there's more than one kind of bias here. People are more likely to notice us criticizing a comment they identify with than the cases that go the other way. We're biased to notice what we dislike and assign more weight to it.
> Believing this is going to made you a worse moderator
In that case I'm a bad moderator already, because everything I've learned about HN is packed into what I said there.