LLMs have their own biases.

But either way, I want people like dang to be the ones moderating and managing a community - call it "personal bias" if you'd like, but they have a vision for the space, and as long as I as a user think that that vision is of a community I want to be in, then it's fine. If I no longer think it is... I leave.

God forbid.

There has to be a better formula to design this game. It seems valuable enough to explore.

It will be hard to design a formula that can only be gamed by making quality contributions.

A quality discussion requires parties who disagree, exchange of ideas and facts and ideally some kind of eventual agreement.

The hardest part is to make it enjoyable to use.

Vote manipulation is a non-issue here because users require a minimum of 500 karma to vote, and because the site is so much smaller than Reddit it can take months to reach that threshold. Downvoting is also capped so that you're very unlikely to get pushed back below the 500 karma threshold unless you are consistently making comments that the community doesn't like. I post things I know won't be well-received here all the time and it's quite rare for a comment to go below -2 karma, but comparatively common for these sorts of comment to get flagged despite not breaking any rules.

4chan was great in 2015 precisely because anyone could comment, but it's a young man's website in that scrolling through a 300 comment thread to find the worthwhile parts of the discussion will require upwards of fifteen minutes, whereas on Reddit or Hacker News most of that sorting is already done. This does have censorial effects, so it isn't ideal for controversial topics like politics, but it's better for almost everything else.

That's like saying you vote for the government by moving to a different state.

This[0] blog post puts it nicely - you _can_ move but you lose all your connections and sometimes even you data.

[0]: https://overreacted.io/open-social/

If HN had existed in 1800 abolitionists would have been banned.

Society does not progress by people being nice and hugging eachother.

Yes this is absolutely correct. I can think of more content that's disallowed on HN than content that's allowed: no politics (for the most part), no flamewars/aggressiveness/name-calling, no self-promoting links to your OnlyFans, nothing hugely offtopic, etc. And that's on top of very aggressive moderation of things other social media sites are filled with but are de facto banned here: shitty puns or jokes, one-line zingers, meaningless affirmation comments like "So much this" or "This is the way", nitpicks about submitted articles or personal swipes at the authors' politics...

HN has incredibly strict moderation, and to be clear, that's a good thing. It keeps discussion in line and useful, for the most part.

> It's funny, the same exact people on here who insist they can't ride the bus or walk around cities because they freak out if a homeless person accosts them seem to be blind to the concept of how other people's free expression can have a chilling effect.

I've seen that the term "gatekeeping" is recently starting to be reclaimed as people realize this, to emphasize that while anyone is welcome to participate, the community is not required to bend its rules or standards to accommodate new people. i.e. anyone is welcome to use the bus, but openly shooting heroin while you're on it won't be tolerated.

> Humans do not pick or latch on to narratives that are correct

Oh, the Party-Approved Correct Narrative.

Nazi/fascist narratives were sure as hell correct in 1930s-1940s Germany, mind you, and have been becoming correct again worldwide since 2020.