Item — HN Reader

by fredley·11y ago·view on hn ↗

To be honest, I don't participate in SO that much. The problems with close votes, and the HN community's dislike of the situation is well known. There is no easy fix for the situation, although I do agree something should be done.

The core of the issue, as was pointed out above, is the vtc-please culture in certain chat rooms. Culture is a very hard thing to change (impossible?), and whatever change you make to how closing works is unlikely to be effective unless cultural change is brought about too.

Achieving a cultural change is simple, not easy.

Simple because the fix consists of watching patterns of behavior for a while, identifying the cliques of users who do this, and then mass-banning them, or at least mass-revoking their privileges to close stuff. For maximum cruelty, just reset and peg their reputation permanently at zero.

Not easy because then they're going to scream their entitled little heads off about it, and you'll need to recruit another generation of active moderators.