Interesting thoughts on moderating a large community. Notable passages:
There are some people who don’t realize Hacker News is moderated at all
“From our perspective, the big surprise is how little control we actually have. We have to play our cards very carefully and very wisely, or even that control will sort of evaporate,” Gackle said. “There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious [political] problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work. What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with individual users. That, case by case by case, seems to move the needle. But it’s very slow.”
Over the years, Gackle and Bell have come to recognize their own triggers—patterns of online discourse that enrage them, depress them, or make them want to walk away. “In terms of the psychological experience of doing this job, all of your buttons are being pushed on a regular basis,” Gackle said. He now knows that it will be hard for him to keep his composure when he is being falsely accused or completely misread. (“That’s pretty much what some of the users do all day—accuse the moderators of doing something that they didn’t,” he said.)
