It’s ironic that many comments are skeptical of strong centralized moderation, but they’re posting these comments on a forum with perhaps the strongest and most centralized moderation team of the entire internet.
All I’m saying is that if weak moderation has had a positive effect somewhere, it’s worth showcasing that. Otherwise the evidence is decisively in favor of strong moderation.
In terms of how to keep the moderation team from deteriorating, other platforms could learn a thing or two from HN: put someone competent in charge of the team, and give them lots of incentives to do well.
HN moderation is easy mode because it's a small site and politics is "banned". Trying to do HN-quality moderation of political discourse among millions of users seems impossible.
There are a lot of users that have complained about the s-banning on this site. While the moderation team of this site seems to be well-intentioned, it does inevitably lead to a very strong slant. S-banning users doesn't make them or their viewpoints go away. They just end up happening elsewhere.
Because those conversations do end up happening elsewhere, this site is famous for leaving readers with a strongly false impression of what viewpoints are actually popular among whatever you would want to call this Silicon Valley hacker / VC scene space.
The highly insidious thing about censorship is not only you don't know what you're not seeing but you don't know you're not seeing it -- you don't know what's missing.
>Because those conversations do end up happening elsewhere
All research shows the opposite in fact. Adding friction to something causes a chilling effect in nearly any and all examples we have ever paid attention to. When you remove easy access to guns, people kill themselves less despite there being other easy ways to do so. When reddit banned a bunch of toxic communities, the entire site had less toxicity, even on subreddits that were unrelated to the toxic communities
Friction works. It works insanely effectively too.
All I’m saying is that if weak moderation has had a positive effect somewhere, it’s worth showcasing that. Otherwise the evidence is decisively in favor of strong moderation.
In terms of how to keep the moderation team from deteriorating, other platforms could learn a thing or two from HN: put someone competent in charge of the team, and give them lots of incentives to do well.