Looks like the inmates won again:

Without linking to the posts, Rochko also mentioned that “a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer” led him to realize it was time to “step back and find a healthier relationship with the project.” It also drove the decision to restructure Mastodon.

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mmooss 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Look at some of the comments in this HN discussion, and you can see what Rochko means.

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bigstrat2003 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Like the other poster said, there's nothing worth losing sleep over in the comments here. Some people trying to start flame wars about politics, and a guy who thinks it's funny to drop racial slurs. None of those is good (and they are all flagged to death which is good), but neither do they make this comment section some kind of cesspool that would show why one is correct to distance oneself from Mastodon.

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deadbabe an hour ago | parent [-]

Sometimes I really wonder what the crowd I interact with here on HN is really like. Are they true tech intellectuals, or are they people who wouldn't hesitate to hurl racial slurs if there wasn't the threat of being banned or flagged.

	▲	threatofrain 31 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Why do you have to wonder? Are people on HN just abstract text to you? Just talk to people.
	▲	throwawayslur an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I promise you, you can be both.

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mikkupikku 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Meh, the worst I see in this thread with show dead on is some tedious criticism, politics slop and one guy posting a racial slur. I can't imagine making decisions about the direction of my life over such mild nothings.

Then again, Mastadon is basically social media for people who can't handle normal social media, so I guess some elevated sensitivity goes with the territory.

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byryan 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I thought it was more 'social media for people that don't like normal social media'. It's not being advertised too on a social media platform and seeing things/interactions that you actually care about and/or are interested in (generally speaking at least).

	▲	LexiMax 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Social media optimizes for engagement. Maybe some folks are into that...or addicted to it...but I remember a time before engagement was hyper-incentivized, where hanging out someplace on the internet was because you liked the people or the community surrounding it. Mastodon reminds me a lot more of those old-school internet hangout spaces, like IRC channels and web forums, than it does Twitter, despite wearing its artifice. If preferring community spaces to habit-forming social media firehoses is somehow cast as "not being able to handle social media," then...guilty as charged, I guess, though it continues to escape me why anybody would consider that a bad thing.

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api 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would never, ever want to have anything to do with running any kind of online community these days, or even anything adjacent to one.

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youniverse 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Let's salute dang for his service.

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Loughla 5 hours ago | parent [-]

For real though. The moderation on this site is on point.

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afavour 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I actually think HN achieves the illusion of greatness via excessive moderation. It’s very easy for users to flag a topic from the front page and (IIRC) there are even automated downranks for threads that attract a lot of back and forth arguing.

The result is a site with relatively measured debate but also a large chunk of missing debate. All that said I don’t have some genius idea about how to do it better so my criticisms can only go so far.

	▲	mindcrime an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, some debate is missing here. But I think it's fair to posit that the debate in question is of low value, and that we're better off without it. Or, at worst, that losing it is a wash in the grand scheme of things. In either case, the owners/operators of HN set a standard for the kind of discourse they want to encourage, and they take steps to encourage it. Nothing wrong with that. Reddit, Slashdot, 4chan, Twitter, and countless other sites exist for people with different tastes.

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LexiMax 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's good that Hacker News has some form of human moderation, which is a lot more than what you can say about a lot of social media spaces.

I wouldn't necessarily call it good, however. HN is absolutely teeming with bad-faith throwaway accounts, and too much faith is put in the user moderation side of things to police them. The user moderation itself is also given far too much leeway - I have lost track of the amount of bad-faith flagging and downvoting I've seen on this site, and there's quite a bit of it even in this thread.

It's nice that the worst of the bad behavior has been flagged or dead-ed. But in communities that I actually use for socializing, behaving badly would get you put on a very short leash, followed by a gentile but firm removal from the community if it persisted. Behaving badly on an alt would get your main account outright banned, and obvious alt accounts would be proactively sought out and removed - sometimes before they even said anything. And in those communities, there are generally no user moderation tools at all, aside from a "report" button, because user moderation is far too easy to gamify and abuse.

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darrmit 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I would absolutely call it good given the volume of comments that flow through here. Not sure what other communities you’re referring to, but my experience over decades of forums and social media is that HN consistently somehow avoids the toxic fate of so many other sites and services like it.

	▲	LexiMax 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> I would absolutely call it good given the volume of comments that flow through here. That's part of the problem. A place this large, this public, and with this little amount of trust isn't really a community. It's the comments section of a content aggregator with a few engagement hooks via voting and user moderation. You can't really "hang out" here, there's no place to actually connect with other human beings unless you go elsewhere. These days, it seems like most "community" spaces have migrated to places like Discord, Matrix, or even VRChat - places that allow for both public spaces and private, invite-only spaces. I've also found that Tildes feels like a community, despite being shaped a lot like Reddit/HN. I suspect that's due to the community still being rather small, not having open invitations, and making nearly all forms of gamified engagement positive. For what it's worth, the largest internet community I knew of prior to the modern era of social media was Something Awful. And, frankly, it was _much_ better run than this place, or any other social media site, as it was moderated by dozens of actual humans who operated transparently - all moderator actions were publicly listed, and you could see the post and reason for the action. The site also charged $10 for access, charged you again if you got banned for breaking the rules or just not being a quality member of the community, and would actively seek out and ban anonymous alt accounts.

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theshackleford an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It wasn’t that great 10 or twenty years ago either. I ran a sizable community in my county in the late to mid 2000s and got death threats, human feces mailed to my home, calls and visits to my place of employment and constant threats of various kinds of lawsuits.

Eventually my blood pressure was driven too high and I fucked it off. A high percentage of people are like barely functioning apes flinging shit and I just got over it.