Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's Thom Holwerda.
Well, that's an embarrassing mistake. Thanks.
Well, it is kind of similar. And for a split second you really made me think it was him, so it's not that big a mistake :)
Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
241–250 of 498 posts
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#242One thing that I appreciate about dang, and PG before him, is their intellectual honesty and strong sense of ethics. On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business. But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition, its been capable of unreasonable greatness and r…
> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it...
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me the difference is that moderation by moderators is (usually) guided by some content policy, and one can disagree about the biases of the specific content policy, or disagree about applying a content policy based on topics and themes at all (as opposed to based on mere style and civility). With user actions, there is no predefined content policy, it’s just how the set of users who happen to read the specific th…
> Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading. I think that's a very different kind of forum, and it needs different tools to be usable, and it more quickly fails into unusability.
It’s how old-style forums work, and I’m still on a couple of them. It functions quite well with the right moderation.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of evidence would satisfy you, then?
I have `showdead` enabled. It should not be the case that I find flagged posts that are good -- that are well written, don't break rules, etc -- but are flagged (presumably) due to expressing a dissenting view.
That ‘presumably’ is doing a lot of lifting and would be better supported by some examples of such posts.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
My issue is it seems like something has to only be a bit controversial to be completely hidden from everyone. There was the recent DF article about how Gruber thinks his articles are being artificially shitlisted and I can't help but agree? I don't necessarily think the mods have their fingers on the scale, but I wouldn't be surprised if the algorithm works in a way where if enough people flag something it gets autom…
That site had 11 major frontpage threads in the last year, which is a lot. Every single one of them set off the flamewar detector. That's extremely unusual. If it were one or two I'd call it random, but 11 in a row, whatever the reason, is not random. We turned off that software penalty on about half of those threads.
In his article https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i... he mentions several times that he is aiming for "comment traction," treating articles with more comments than upvotes as successful while complaining that recently there haven't been as many comments.
It does make sense that DaringFireball would consider starting a flamewar a job well done, but of course HN is optimizing for the opposite.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#246Nice! Thanks for the good work.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#247Welcome aboard Tom. Thanks to the efforts of dang HN has become an incredible community. I've learned a lot on here and made some great friends.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are flagging posts that they see as pushing an agenda. There isn’t some official separation of agenda-less and agenda-full ideas.
Posts that break guidelines should be flagged, and the bar should be pretty high. I don't think there is a guideline that bans posts from "pushing an agenda" (which would be very subjective)
I draw a distinction between posts and comments here.
Comments that are "pushing an agenda" are noticeable because they Just. Will. Not. Deviate. From. The. Party. Line. Ever. They will never acknowledge an opposing viewpoint's point, no matter how valid. It's not a good faith conversation, and it deserves to be both downvoted and flagged. When one side (or both!) is like talking to a brick wall, this is often what's going on.
Posts are harder. If user X posts articles pushing a viewpoint, that's harder to prove that they're intending to do that. Or it would be, except that user X will also usually be active in the discussion about the article, and their comments will fit the above pattern. If you see that, then you can say that the post was probably pushing an agenda as well.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#249> He has been doing HN moderation work for years already and knows the site and its practices inside-out, so the only new thing you'll see is mod comments from Tom showing up in the threads the way mine do. I wonder if there are any other secret moderators.
We're all secret moderators except you.
Re: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is HN is mainly left leaning so its difficult to have discussion at times as dang and the community will shut it down quickly as differing opinions are not welcome even if its factual. (chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS nOt TrUe") (Love how HN proved my comment as correct)
> (chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS nOt TrUe") > (Love how HN proved my comment as correct) Please don't do this here. It's against the site guidelines (see the bottom: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ), which guarantees downvotes, and then the combination of help-help-I'm-being-repressed and I-told-you-so is annoying to pretty much everyone. As for "left leaning", se…
Yeah, as someone who has criticized the mod team, saying you are biased is just laughable. You go out of your way to be as unbiased and user-oriented as possible. My biggest criticism is procedural, Dan and friends are doing good work.