71–80 of 409 posts
It had several upvotes 19 constructive comments and was perfectly reasonable IMHO.
What gives, not a big drama. I shrugged it off, though it left a negative taste of things to come.
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dang made a full writeup here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 I agree it (along with other moderation behaviors described in the article) should be documented more explicitly in the guidelines/FAQ
I think HN is factoring in that transparency can also be a weakness too. When google released its page-rank algorithm it became a target for manipulation and entire forums got wrecked (until nofollow) with the wave of consequences it created. I think the threat of user manipulation will always outweigh that of mod manipulation. Worth considering.
There's no master plan behind it all, but each of these ways of handling policy has a purpose. Describing evolving policy in comments allows the moderators to be responsive and flexible without overrunning the site with metadiscussion like they would if every new decision they made was accompanied by a formal change in the guidelines. Relating policy in email discussion gives them a chance to explain it in context and to take feedback from the people most impacted or interested in that policy --- we all know votes on this site wouldn't generate that set of users.
The stuff they don't make public is generally stuff we don't want made public. We forget that there are just a couple (I think literally) people running this site, and they're up against waves of people trying to create schemes to sell front page rank to spammers. They've got a sort of equilibrium that gives them a chance --- something Reddit seems to be failing at despite a much large team --- while still having the time to type out individualized contextualized explanations for all their routine moderating actions on threads (seriously, mods, figure out TextExpander or build something like it into your moderating tools).
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If you don't like the way this site is edited, stand up an m1.large, hook Rails up to an sqlite database, and build your own. You'll be two generations of technology ahead of HN. The freedom to take other people's private belongings and repurpose them to your own ends is no real kind of freedom at all. But that's ultimately what you're yearning for when you allude to the Empire of Napoleon.
I'm not complaining. HN is about the best of what we've got. My Napoleon reference was the slobbering nature of the comment, which is so pro-moderation as to lose objectivity.
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I mention it because the article says shadowbanning is rare. It’s not that rare if they’ve got some kind of stored procedure that just goes around doing it.
It would make no sense to ban an IP for only a single session. Shadowbanning can still be rare (for whatever value of rare) when an IP ban is persistent.
In my opinion, far more than moderation, HN is effected by who votes for the new articles. If you look at the "new" page then most stories never even get one upvote. Those who do go over there and upvote stories have far more power than those who only ever look at the front page. Sadly, it seems that there are too many stories on "new" for a person to sit there, read each one, and upvote, so the only real way to get…
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Even though HN is a community, the front page is essentially the mods' personal judgment. They are the editors, and HN is a newspaper. I like it this way. They have excellent taste. The community has repeatedly proven it cannot be trusted to upvote intellectually gratifying content. pg's original HN code contained a flag for "rally", meaning the story is a rallying cry, and is therefore penalized because it's so easy…
HN's cool but it's just one forum among a million others. The moderation is good though sometimes arbitrary. That's a lot easier for users to accept when they know why they are getting positively/negatively moderated, which is a good reason for more openness. But at the end of the day it's a forum, the moderators have the final say, that's the contract you agree to in using it.
There are probably a bunch of people behind the scenes, and they deserve lots of credit too. But there is something incredible about being able to post a dozen moderation comments every day for years without ever being so mistaken as to provoke community backlash. It would be really easy for them to offer an offhand opinion, or just make a bad call, and suddenly have people up in arms about it.
They're also some of the most humble people. Both of them have done some really amazing work and have cool hobbies. But I've sort of had to pry that info out of them over years.
http://github.com/gruseom/numen - Dan's project. JS REPL for emacs. It took another four years for anyone to even come close (https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium) as far as I know.
https://github.com/sctb/lumen - Scott's project. A self-hosted Lisp that compiles and runs in both JS and Lua. The whole codebase recompiles in about one second flat when using LuaJIT.
But like, that's maybe 5% of the cool stuff they've done. There's just no outward sign -- they don't bother with blog posts or any kind of self-promotion.
So yes, all hail the kings of lisp.
I've had accounts banned for no apparent reason, or for laughable reasons that are not even in the poorly written guidelines.
Moderators also have been repeatedly caught about heavy handed moderation. They control the platform, they control the message, they do not allow meta discussion, why believe anything they say?
As for comment moderation, I think that HN is a community with the least amount of moderation i've seen. Which makes me really happy.
I have submitted only three or four things here, so I don't really know how nice (or not nice) is HN from the submitters' point of view.
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Sure... it's still mostly about votes right? "Popular things go to the top" is a pretty good first approximation of the algorithm. You have things getting flagged to death for generating bad conversation/flamewars (kinda like parents telling kids to stop playing rough since people are getting hurt). There's the hiring posts. At least to me, it's always felt like moderation is happening at the margins.
Votes are a powerful signal here because they're the easiest signal to automate. That leads people to believe their HN votes are more sacred than they are. There has never been a point in the history of the site where it's ever been unclear that the site is ultimately run by the mods. People complaining now should find someone who's been on here for a long time and ask what it was like under Paul Graham. Hint: not be…
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How so? HN is run by YC, and HN is used to promote YC companies and attract talent and normalize YC-style startup culture. Please elaborate before being so dismissive--you know, like we used to do on old HN.
I wrote a longer comment, originally, but cut it back to the single sentence when I realized that by dignifying the argument I was only lending your tossed-off slur more credibility. HN is not moderated so as to be agitprop for YC. Nobody who's talked to Dan for more than a couple minutes, or watched this site discuss the SFBA tech industry, could believe that. The difference between the site post-Dan and pre-Dan ---…
I am not arguing dang is doing a bad job--I'm arguing that their job is done with an eye more towards keeping a community in line with YC interests than promoting pure free-speech or hacker culture.
That includes things like killing off certain contentious posts, removing grossly off-topic material, and a lot of other frankly decent moderation.