Hi Dang! I help run Hack Club's moderation team, and found this comment great food for thought on moderation. I've seen this pattern in Hack Club in heated discussions, and when dealing with messy incidents.
I would love to read some more thoughts you have on this or discuss other questions about moderation and advice. Could I email you with some questions? Happy to also look at an archive of comments where you've discussed this before.
My name is Arav Narula, and I'm a 17 year old high school senior from Toronto!
Over the past 2 years, I've had the opportunity to help rebuild Toronto's high school hacker community. It's been really magical being able to run hackathons, and see Toronto's high school hacker scene come more to life in the last 2 years. Last May, me and a group of friends ran Apocalypse -- Canada's largest and longest high school hackathon at Shopify HQ! It was a really rewarding event, but I'm not here to talk about that.
There's something that's bothered me for a long time and that is that there is a tendency in online communities where there is a lack of physical connection.
This is true in Hack Club and almost every other community I’ve been part of that’s tangentially computer-related. Programming and programming-related mediums are often solitary activities, and hackathons attempt to solve this problem by bringing hackers together to build a long-term hacker community. Hackathons are great for just technical experiences, but they don’t give an opportunity to connect beyond just simple conversation.
The fact is that hackathons have a culture of building and shipping, and that’s perfect for the problem it's attempting to solve. I think hackathons still have their place and should exist. But in my opinion, social connectivity is also vital. When it comes to building and maintaining hacker communities, there needs to be further incentives for people to hang out, learn from each other, and have people they can just do things with.
I think meetups provide the missing middle of bringing people together; while hackathons allow for the base of a hacker community to form, meetups allow those people to gel from just acquaintances into real friend groups!
While I contend that this blog post might not be fully relevant to most of the people who read Hackernews, I hope the account opens up the floor to how we can better build and maintain hacker communities, and how meetups can play a role there. I hope it also serves as an inspring story of how this happened.
Would love some feedback! The template I'm using for my blog is a bit janky, and I'm aware of errors. If you're on desktop, reloading should fix the problem.
I love Hack Club because it's truly one of the most radically kind & creative spaces on the internet. Before I found Hack Club, programming felt very solitary to me. It didn't really feel like it's something I could do with other people, yet alone myself. But since then I've found community, made friends, and pushed myself to build things I never knew I could make. Along the way, I've got to attend crazy hackathons like Outernet (which we ran on a campground in VT), and got to organize Canada's largest & biggest high school hackathon back in May (https://apocalypse.hackclub.com), and have all sorts of other adventures.
Hack Club is run by adults (you can see the team page here: https://hackclub.com/team), and every aspect of Hack Club is also built by teenagers contributing to everything from HCB (our fiscal sponsership platform) to High Seas (https://highseas.hackclub.com), a program we're running right now.
Happy to help if you still need help setting something up for your son :)
I would love to read some more thoughts you have on this or discuss other questions about moderation and advice. Could I email you with some questions? Happy to also look at an archive of comments where you've discussed this before.
Thank you!