MattMaroon.com

I’ve still been reading and contributing to Non-Hacker News daily. Being Moderator-In-Chief there has become harder than I thought it might be, even with only a dozen or so people contributing stories.

My goal is still to keep moderation light, so my philosophy is that when I think a particular story is borderline, I should leave it. I’d rather err on the side of not killing, as to do otherwise might enforce my own personal viewpoints onto the site, which I really don’t want. That’s what this blog is for. On the other hand, there’s a fine line at which discussion devolves into what we see on Digg, which has become little more than a P.R. machine for Obama and Apple.

Politics is, unsurprisingly, the trickiest part. On one hand, I want to allow political discussion, and there’ve been some fascinating links there about it. On the other hand, I don’t want it to become apparently pro-Obama (or McCain, though there’s little chance of that on a social news site).

So I try to keep it to articles that examine and report about trends and facts with little or no editorializing. Articles such as this one, pointing out that both campaigns are going negative with personal attacks, and this one pointing out that the GOP is filing a fundraising complaint against the Obama campaign, were easy. Two tough ones submitted in the last couple days were this one about recent McCain rallies and this one about CNN’s reporting on the Bill Ayers story.

Both I thought long and hard about. The first one could be seen as anti-McCain, but I really didn’t feel it was. It was just reporting on what’s going on with his camp. The second one (which is certainly anti-Obama) had my finger on the kill button for a few seconds mainly because it editorializes in the last paragraph. Up until that point, it was just someone reporting that CNN reported that Obama was lying about the Ayers connection. Ultimately I decided to let the votes decide in both cases, but I’m still not sure if I made the right call. At least if I erred, I did so once in favor of each candidate.

So far I killed one story that was outright racist, and in fact I think I waited too long to do so because I hadn’t fully read it. I killed another one too. I can’t remember what it was exactly, but I think it was a link to Daily Kos or Huffington Post or something like that, that I felt editorialized too much. And I changed a few titles to match the title of the article it was linking to, because someone had clearly editorialized there (or in one case, it felt a little too link-baitish) which I don’t want.

Either way, I think we’re at 2 kills out of 230 posts, so not bad. I really do believe that killing is discouraging enough that, when combined with outright bans of people whose posts are killed repeatedly (which I’ve not seen at all yet) will allow you to keep a site’s quality up with only a very small amount. Something like 0.5% moderation might mean the difference between Digg and Hacker News.

Slinkset, which I host it on, has been great. Setup was easy, and they even rolled out a couple nice features for me. The site is up and responsive every time I look at it, so there haven’t been any dependability problems. In fact when Hacker News went down (as it is wont to do sometimes) people commented on it on Non-Hacker News. Ah, the irony.

So I couldn’t really be much happier with them. I’ve used a couple similar services in the past, including CoRank and self-hosted Pligg, and this is far easier and better. There’s really no comparison. Ability to use my own domain makes them much better than CoRank (though in fairness, I haven’t used that in a long time and they may offer it now) and Pligg was just a constant pain to customize.