Tom Howard is going public as HN moderator today. 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'm not going anywhere, so you'll have two of us to put up with going forward :)
I've known Tom since he was sctb's and my batchmate back in YC W09. Many of you know him as the kind and thoughtful community member tomhoward (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhoward). He's still kind and thoughtful, but he's going to post as tomhow from now on (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhow), the same way I switched to dang when I went through this rite of passage years ago.
Below is a bit from Tom about himself. Please join me in welcoming him to this new status which he was crazy enough to say yes to!
---
YC and HN have been a huge part of my life for nearly two decades. I read pg's essay How to Start a Startup in 2005 after my friend (and later, co-founder) Fenn found it on Slashdot, and it opened our eyes as to how to go about building products and companies. I first signed up in late 2007, and since then HN has been the place I come to find interesting news and discussions.
Hacker News gave me a window into the big wide world of technology and startups, that had previously seemed so remote and opaque from where I lived (and still live) in Australia. We were lucky enough to be accepted into the W09 batch of YC, and since then HN has been a place where we could share announcements about the startup, but also where I could share the challenges and struggles I experienced in the startup journey and other aspects of life, particularly to do with health and wellbeing.
From the discussions that have happened about these topics I've ended up making enduring friendships with people all over the world, and have been able to learn many things that have improved my life in profound ways. I love HN's ethos - of being a place people come to engage their curiosity. That's what it's always been for me and what I hope I can help it to be for everyone!
--Tom
It’s been a privilege to help support this community and to work alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years. It’s a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving community, and I’m continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts thought and energy into it.
One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the bait and switch is on…
Nice to hear someone else is looking at Arc now as well! Any chance we might see some issues on anarki resolved now? Perhaps https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/89 would be a good starting point :grin:
Jokes aside, its good to see YC cares about community, and looking forward to seeing your nick in the comments. Good luck
Thanks for your moderation work so far, and welcome as an official moderator. Glad you'll be helping Dang keeping this an awesome community.
I would love it if you could get the current HN code base into a state that it could be open sourced
I understand the desire to keep certain aspects “secret sauce” to prevent abuse, but surely that could be addressed with some kind of plugin mechanism and then just don’t open source those plugins
Dang and Tom, please keep doing what you're doing.
How lucky are we that our contributions here warrant two fine moderators?
I just read Tom's brief story on how he arrived here and what it means and felt... I don't really have a quick word for it.
I know I am better for having spent time here.
Oh, I got it! A tiny bit spoiled, but in the best of ways. Yeah, that is what I felt.
How lucky we are indeed. :)
Also, don't forget that it's mainly other users who flag, not moderators.
Also also, it's a bit ironic coming from a 3 months old account with already negative karma. I believe HN has a problem with users who create many new accounts and don't bother to understand "what is a good thoughtful comment" and change their behaviour.
I turned it on very soon after I setup my account. My own personal tolerance for speech is less aggressive than what we see here on HN. I dislike completely inaccessible history, and basic accountability is why.
Works like the trash does. Want to see how people live? Pick through the trash.
Tom (and Fenn) had rockstar status back when I was involved in university CS+Entrepreneurship clubs in Melbourne around 2009/2010 (mostly led by fine students at UniMelb, but I was helping spread the word at Monash) because they were the first(maybe one of the first?) Aussies to be accepted by YC. They always generously gave their time and advice at these student events, even dropped by the SiliconBeach networking meets to share their experiences and turned out to be exceptionally kind human beings in person. Definitely the right choice for moding this community!
We were the first startup to be Australian-based then move to the U.S. for YC.
Omnisio was an all-Australian team from the year before us but they were already residing in the U.S.
The first ever Australian-originated co-founder of a YC-backed company was Jamie Cameron. He co-founded Virtualmin, a commercially-supported fork of Webmin for virtual hosting, which Jamie first released in 1997. It looks like Virtualmin is still active today, which is awesome.
It just so happens that Jamie and Fenn used to sit next to each other in the software development team at Pacific Internet in Melbourne, where we all worked in the early 00s. Jamie's brother, Michael Cameron, was a co-founder of Rome2Rio, which was based at Inspire9 along with us from about 2011-12, and became one of the most successful consumer travel startups out of Australia.
I wonder if there are any other secret moderators.
I have people call me Joenot - in reality, this username was chosen decades ago by my mother, pairing Joe (my name) and Not(tawa) - my tiny hometown.
Sometimes I wish I'd chosen better but like many names, once it's out there, it tends to stick.
I prefer the dyslexic pronunciation of towhom.
WAIT WHAT?!?
Pronounced exactly as "to meow"
Then we can continue confusing the beginnings of comments that appeal to authority as interjections.
It's always a site that's had dinner party vibes even tho it's so big. Weird! But the focus on curiosity and healthy is important.
I'm sure the features of HN are already extremely well thought out and precisely balanced, but I guess this is as good a time as any to throw out a feature idea: you know how you can favorite stories and comments? I want to favorite users, too. Maybe privately. Because it's like a bookmark thing where I can come back and see what interesting ones are doing. Just makes sense to internalize it as a list rather than externalize it into a browser bookmark list, I think. But then again, maybe a private list or yet another list would be too much!
Thanks dang and other mods for protecting this sacred corner of the web for so long. You're the guardians of the best no-BS tech news community. It is truly an under-appreciated effort.
Best wishes.
I laughed at this phrasing. Welcome tomhow!
Automation, sure. But people need to sleep sometime, and maybe also have some life outside HN, for mental health. ;)
Moderation is a huge part of what makes HN so valuable, so it's good to hear dang is getting some much needed help as this place apparently won't stop growing
I thought that sctb was another one? No longer I guess?
I want to say Congrats but moderating HN must have been a painful job.
So I guess enjoy, have fun and see you around. :)
Thanks (in arrears and advance) for all the work here; this is the best forum on the Internet, and we owe much of it to you guys.
Anywho, welcome tomhow.
I'm long time lurker on hn. Excited to see you as mod.
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 real authenticity.
At this point, HN is sort of the tail that wags the YC dog. There are a great many seed funds but only one HN.
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.
Good luck and thanks!
I think it's at least as plausible that this is part of the magic that makes it good. HN is sufficiently "on the margin" that they don't have to do things like placate advertisers with their moderation policies. The mods like dang, tomhow and pg mostly care about HN as users rather than owners.
> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term.
That sounds good in theory... in practice it might be the beginning of the end. Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a mission of its own. Although I'm actually not sure of the legal status of HN right now, maybe it's already something like that.
I agreed, and would say its stronger than that. Running HN well is great for Y Combinators reputation, and its focused on a relevant audience. I am sure that has to be very good for them.
> Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a mission of its own.
Absolutely. It happens a lot.
And I'd bet that few people here want to see ads, or start paying for their accounts.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it...
Remember when the biggest disagreements were about ORM & Frameworks? I miss those days. I didnt even mind the discussion about the ethics of Uber or Airbnb, but now, now it is different, & not for the better.
Early days had a lot more discussion about the business side of startups and vc. Then it started shifting more towards tech too the point now where startup/business discussion is mostly limited to Show/Ask posts.
Then there's the widening of scope to big social issues that's a different matter altogether.
To me it feels more emotional catharsis than intellectual discussion; getting mad at politics is getting mad at something you can't control and so is more of a way to air out your emotions. Getting mad at corporate structure or envisioning a cooperative is something we can control and requires more rigor to engage with.
The fun has been sucked out of it all. It wasn't all that long ago that we were excited by simple but fun devices like the iPad Nano and Flip camera. Now we all have phones that can shoot Hollywood films, we can access all art every created on them, and we have watches that can save our lives...and we've got a bit too used to it.
On top of that around here we used to get excited about scrappy startups raising funding and trying to change the world. Unfortunately because a number of those companies went on to dominate the world in negative ways, exploit users and hoard wealth, people have become jaded and scrappy startups are less exciting because we assume they'll eventually do something loathsome 10 years from now.
I'd love more framework debates, excitement, and creativity - but until the wider world is happy and positive again I'm not going to hold my breath.
These days HN reminds me a lot of Reddit r/programming in the early 2010s. To me this isn't a good thing because I used to come to HN to specifically get informed commentary. But there's no way for a site as big as HN to be dominated by informed content anymore because there just aren't that many people working on interesting tech in the world. So I do what most others do I suspect which is talk with friends from my alma mater and old jobs in group chats and share HN links and laugh at the unhinged, uninformed comments.
I do think at this point HN has changed its appeal. I feel that people today are attracted to HN because of its raucous, rumor-mill feel rather than informed commentary.
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.
It does make sense that DaringFireball would consider starting a flamewar a job well done, but of course HN is optimizing for the opposite.
I'd come to that conclusion after scraping all "past" front pages from 2006 through May-ish 2023 and doing a number of analyses of that corpus. (I've commented on that a few times here on HN and on the Fediverse.)
One of the absolute spiciest discussions ever was a pg post about HN itself. Which suggests that when a topic of of direct interest and familiarity, people will tend to hop on it. There are also a great many flame-y threads, though note that by virtue of making the front page, my sample probably skews to less disastrous threads with the absolute sh*tshows being well below the top-30 fold.
Among other weaknesses, spiciness doesn't distinguish between pure troll/clickbait threads, and those on which there's a significant and justified spread of opinion. As such, the metric makes hard discussions even harder to have, though mods can and do turn off the penalty on request (often many hours after the discussion's started, for obvious reasons, which is its own penalty). I do wish that HN could have those discussions, and I've thought and written (both on HN and in emails to mods) about what that might entail. I'm coming to the long-delayed and somewhat regrettable conclusion that it's not the right tool for that particular job.
I only really recognize this because I'll be actively reading/replying sometimes and see comments go +/- 2-3 up or down votes back and forth on the same comment. While you may be at say -2, that's just the aggregate. I sometimes wish I could see the total up/down votes just out of curiosity.
Mildly controversial opinions sometimes survive and get discussion, but anything past that rarely get a reply and just get downvoted and flagged into oblivion. This isn't exactly a slight against HN, as this happens basically everywhere past a tiny userbase community. But I don't think it's particularly right to put HN on a pedestal for its ability to handle controversy.
What more evidence do you need that spirited disagreement is alive and well here?
Your vouched items should be visible to you at https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=dooglius
edit: sorry, I missed the sibling comment to this. I only ever come across dead comments, not posts. So I needed to add &kind=comment to see vouched comments.
> The people here are rather anti-compassion and any kind of spirituality. And how I was attacked for calling David Lynch a worthless purveyor of ultraviolence and vapid, wasteful lifestyles was unconscionable.
Maybe your problem is not with your opinions but with how you choose to express them. My observation is that disagreement is rarely downvoted massively if it is expressed eloquently. OTOH, emotional and brief conclusory opinions that aren’t supported with narratives or supporting information that are also contrarian may be subject to mass downvoting.
Looking through your comment history, I think you’re experiencing this phenomenon not because you respectfully disagree with others, but because of the quality of your communication.
We're all Paul Graham! https://youtu.be/FKCmyiljKo0?t=65
For not-bad comments just vouch them, but for very-good-I-will-not-be-able-to-sleep-until-it-is-unkilled comments vouch and send an email.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
Those people are wrong.
I reserve my downvotes for when arguments are made in bad faith, rely on logical fallacies, or present know-false information as an argument.
If someone presents an argument on something I disagree with, but it's made in good faith and is well-structured, it deserves an upvote, even if I still disagree afterwards.
The problem is that there is no one with power here that can come to the "little guy's" defence. There is no will around here for that kind of support, because the only people hired to wield such power are of like mind. DJT doesn't hire democrats, and this is no different.
Look at this comment section, and tell me this isn't an echo chamber.
> That's just life.
Life is the result of what we choose, alone and in our groups, and groupthink creates a momentum that is hard to understand from within the group.
Only compassion gives us a clear and accurate perspective on life, my friend.
And that's a fact, and its not being a factor in this site's m.o. is precisely why it is the way it is, why it is staffed by whom it's staffed by, and why its founder has the Twitter profile picture he does and why he rails against DEI.
It's also why your opinions are so valued here, and why you don't understand what I said.
Perhaps you won't be so privleged some day and then you will begin to really understand what life is really about.
Without such a gift from life, you will most likely just continue to think you understand, while asking far fewer questions than you should.
What role does compassion play in your life? That is the most genius question you can ever ask yourself, and is really the only one worth either asking or answering.
That fact is never accepted as truth by those who already "know it all". Such is the way of "facts". Unless your knowledge base is founded upon compassion, nothing truly eloquent will be perceived as such. Such is human life, my friend. All the rest is just mammalian, when it comes to human beings in their groups.
Is your group founded on compassion? That you don't value it does not mean it is not the most valuable concept in the universe.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
> I disagree.
Head explodes
If anyone wants more, here's a longer explanation from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538728.
And that is a huge reason why HN's flagging/moderation is rather good! Thanks for the good system.
You can't argue in people's stead. If most dissenting commentary is hurtful, inciteful, manipulative, generally demagogue, etc., it's going to get culled, and you get a situation where "dissent isn't thriving".
Otherwise, what exactly is moderation for?
Moderation absolutely drives the culture, by setting a tone that drives away certain users while attracting others.
In other words what ever issues a site has are inherently due to moderation whether it be a choice on the part the moderators or a lack of resources to moderate as they would like to.
Personally I hope Tom will bring new moderation policies that will truly let unpopular opinions thrive, but I don't have high hopes here since this is just an announcement of a new moderator, not an announcement of new moderation policies.
"downvote" seems more appropriate for for "this is not interesting and should be less prominent".
"flag" seems more appropriate for "this should not be here at all".
By way of an example, on a political story, if you say something merely unpopular, you'll get downvotes and replies; if you say something hateful, you'll (usually) get flagged.
I don't think that's generally a function of the moderators though.
That's why I have only flagged one or two posts, ever, but not because I was mad, but because the comment was just plain beyond the pale.
And my posts against portaying violent rape in film got flagged.
Make it make sense, because I understand the failure of this system because systems are my trade-in-craft.
I have flagged a few comments but I'm rarely mad.
And if one is mad because of a disrespectful comment, the flagging is probably appropriate too.
Yes, indeed.
This is cope, just like "I'm being downvoted for speaking the truth!". Nobody thinks "wow, they said a true statement, I should downvote them".
I suggest you try to steelman the idea of flagging and see that maybe there could be other things at play.
Precisely. That's the biggest problem with closed-minded fools.
There is a difference between expressing unpopular opinions (e.g. "manifest V3 is good"), which receive an appropriate level of considered disagreement; and expressing opinions that are removed administratively.
In my experience, the former is quite common, while the latter only occurs in cases of hateful or off-topic comments. That is as it should be. No one is obligated to agree with you, and that fact should not dissuade you from expressing yourself.
What I see a lot of is this:
User posts "$opinion $generalization $snark $dismissal $adhominem".
User gets down voted or flagged. User complains that downvotes are for expressing $opinion and that $opinion is not allowed on this site!
But we can all see the other things in their post that probably brought on most of the downvotes.
Most stuff I downvote is because of the way it's expressed, not because of the opinion itself.
That's not a moderation issue. You can post that opinion, and people will disagree with it, post responses to it, and downvote it. It will not be flagged out of existence, unless it's also violating site policy in other ways.
Meanwhile personal attacks and hyperbole regarding Elon Musk and Trump have become very common on HN.
Speaking from personal experience only: I have mostly not observed "polite, well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream" get downvoted to oblivion, unless some other factor also applies, such as that they're also things that seem likely to lead to a rehashed old-as-the-hills disagreement with no new information that will not on balance change any minds.
If you post (by way of example only, please observe the use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads are good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive pile of downvotes, I think that's a reasonable signal that the community isn't interested in seeing iteration 47,902 of that argument, and has no expectation that anything new will come out of that argument. If you have something new to say on that topic that is likely to lead into new and interesting arguments, at this point you would need to signpost that heavily, prefacing it with some equivalent of "Please note that I'm aware this is an age-old argument, but I think I have a new point to make that is worth considering", and then actually make a new point, at which point I think you're less likely to get downvoted to oblivion.
Personally, I don't downvote "mere" disagreement. I downvote (among other things) what seems to me to be uninteresting or thoughtless or insufficiently diligent disagreement, or factually incorrect information, or anything that seems like a discussion that spawned from it will not be interesting.
Now, that said, another factor here is that some people posting on political topics in particular believe they're making "polite well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream", and others do not share that belief and flag it to oblivion. For example, posts expressing bigotry mostly get flagged, no matter how surface-level "polite" they are.
Sure, I imagine the grandparent poster means arguing something like "limiting access for extensons is good because they're often used to steal financial assets". Old extensions are sold, or cracked and updated to inclue malware.
Why is this required, in order not for the comment to be downvoted to oblivion? You may be confusing bias with nuance.
(It's still regularly abused on stories as a downvote, perhaps in part because stories don't have downvotes. HN sometimes "rescues" stories that get over-flagged, but it's still a problem.)
Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading. But I also think that active moderation and crowd-sourced ranking mechanics are two different things.
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.
For example, I think it's useful that on balance the top few comments and their discussion are likely to be interesting, and the last few comments are unlikely to be interesting.
I definitely DO NOT mean clear hate speech, etc.. that's not my point at all.
Shouting matches and rhetorical posturing are exhausting. There are places for that—most places online, anymore; this is not one of them.
But I'm the one that is rate limited in this thread and prevented from interacting with people politely.
On the other hand, I think it needs to be more specific in order to be valuable feedback. Which dissenting opinions? Can you provide specific examples of comments you think got unreasonably flagged?
There's been an uptick in political posts which are off-topic per the guidelines, so an uptick in the absolute number of flagged submissions would just mean the community is properly enforcing the guidelines, which is good. However, as a consequence of that uptick in political submissions and flagging, there's also an uptick in the number of users complaining a post is unjustly flagged, because they incorrectly conflate enforcing the guidelines with political opinion, and that is not good.
I think a lot of users are tired of this back and forth, so my guess is they are reading between the lines of what you said (since you didn't provide specifics) and filling in the blank with what _they_ think you mean about undeserved flagging, with the topic of politics being top of mind at the moment. This shows that being specific helps both by providing actionable feedback while also increasing clarity, which is your responsibility as a communicator.
A huge part of that is that the tone is almost always civil and the arguments are typically in good faith.
I think the community can be pretty susceptible to groupthink and hyper-conformity, and there are tons of legitimate criticisms around that. But it's true that usually the mod team won't suffer directly from that, from what I've seen.
1. Groupthink has a negative connotation of the downsides baked in.
2. "Hyper" conformity (or hyper anything) is already saying that it is too much.
I think it's well known and appreciated that without diversity of thought and opinion, a group or organization makes possibly locally optimized, but poor decisions.
This kind of thinking led to the term “mainstream media” becoming a pejorative term, even though it fairly represented the majority viewpoint. In a well-informed society[1], one should expect the majority opinion to be the one closest to objective truth. (Consider the old “guess the number of jelly beans in the jar” experiment.)
[1] Yes, I am aware that this condition is doing some heavy lifting. :-)
I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.
I don't think this extends to the way that HN is moderated or run. It is worth looking at dang's posts every now and again to take in the job that he does and how patient he can be, even with antagonism aimed directly at HN or himself personally.
From time to time I also have a look at the histories of some of those antagonistic people. Frequently there are signs that their behaviour was not always like this. Recent posts might be outright abusive and sound like the postings of angry teenagers. A few years earlier they might have been posting reasonable discussions on their thesis topic or tutorials on some useful subjects. Keeping that in mind helps you realise that these are real people and there may be other things going on in their life.
I think there are some good things to learn from people who work with addicts. You can simultaneously challenge bad behaviour and be compassionate to the person who committed it. Similarly, this is why I'm not a fan of cancelling people or holding them forever accountable for past bad behaviour. If they recognise that their behaviour was bad and are endeavouring to not be that way again, I don't think permanent ostracism benefits anyone. If anything it restricts people to a community that amplifies their negative behaviour.
That's a valid use of the button by design, HN is literally made to allow for that use. Plus it mimics real life interactions - there is a social cost/friction to saying things people disagree with or think are outright wrong. Most online chitchat places deteriorate because they remove such social frictions.
I think there is a far greater real life social cost in violating standards of behaviour, such as aggressive engagement, or acting without empathy. I would argue that it is those influences that can be lacking in online discussions that cause them to deteriorate. There is also a lower barrier of entry for joining an online community than joining a real life community. A few dedicated but detrimental people can always evade safeguards and pollute a community to some degree, online communities being larger provide the possibility to each individual to do more damage, while also increasing the chances of there being individuals that would do so.
I would say this is straight up wrong. It is universal since it's fundamental to being a social animal. There's a cost to being at odds with a group. We do have all sorts of mechanism and rituals, formal and informal, to minimize or amortize that cost in all sorts of settings but it's still there and it's still essential. You look at the faces of your coworkers in a meeting in which you're making some unpopular proposal to see how it's going over and you feel the slight sting of recognizing the smallest hints of disapproval. It's built right into all human interaction.
Downvoting is a legitimate expression of disagreement according to PG.
Better sites don't do this and have in-good-faith discussion despite disagreement.
Dissenting views are regularly highly visible, often as replies to consensus views. Even better - well-argued counter-narrative/counter-conventional wisdom views regularly appear as top or highly ranked comments. That's because the people making those arguments do what sensible people do when making an unpopular argument - they put in the work to make their case more persuasive. They don't sit around complaining that the other kids don't listen to them, they care about their issue enough to try to work with human nature rather than hoping some magical technology will change human nature for them.
(chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS nOt TrUe")
(Love how HN proved my comment as correct)
> (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", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 (Feb 2021). The specific examples are old now but there is an endless fresh supply from each tap.
This is largely an illusion, as can be seen by the number of people complaining in the other direction about how wacko libertarians or MAGA or whatever dominate on here.
What you're actually observing is that HN is one of the more diverse public spaces you participate in and there's no personalized algorithm that filters the content to only show what you want. When your exposure to left-leaning content goes from <10% on an algorithmic feed to ~50% on HN, it feels like being overrun.
Just know that it feels just as overwhelming to the left-leaning people on here, and they will jump to the same interpretation in the opposite direction.
I do think it's OK for some forums - if the community agrees - to say certain topics (like politics) are off limits.
I don't really think it's ok for a community to say discussion about what should be discussed is off limits... or being critical of policies, the bubble, etc...
Your comment is (a) off-topic and (b) smacks of a complaint about not getting enough up-votes. Neither of these areas are looked upon positively in HN. If this style of comment is your modus operandi, it may explain why your work is not well-received, and in short it has nothing to do with the popularity of your opinions.
I just would like for more people to acknowledge that. IDK. Seems more honest and more fitting to what everyone says the HN culture "really is."
And this comment of yours I'm replying to will probably get downvoted because it's a complaint about votes that contributes literally nothing to the conversation (in fact, detracts from it).
It's not a complaint. I'm just pointing them out. Without them I couldn't argue my case at all.
"I the noble freethinker, standing bravely against the mob" comments are boring and repetitive, and therefore always off topic.
Nice to see another helper. Dan, you are truly wonderful and I hope you never leave us, however, I also hope this affords you some much deserved "time off". Welcome Tom, and how.
Curious that you both made new accounts, is that basically a similar thing to having a "root" user then? So you can't use a normal / previous account or it will ruin it? :)
Thanks for keeping the standards so high here!
WA here, hehe. Congrats!
My bad.
Without any negativity on Tom, whom I'm sure is excellent, I suspect you failed on this one @dang.
And B: Just curious, what was dang's old longname?
Thanks for putting up with the work - let's go!
https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i...
What does that comic strip say, "Everything's fine."?
Most people desire nothing more than to ignore their own faults, unless they have the power to shut up their critics.
https://volantio.com
https://amadeus.com/en/airlines/products/volantio
https://amadeus.com/en/blog/articles/creating-a-private-resa...
It’s good to see MGR (Moderator Geographic Redundancy) being implemented on HN ;-)
Using RAID as an analogy, we now have RAID 1 moderators so let’s hope to have RAID 6 soon :-P
Ok ok, enough with the silly tech jokes and the smiley’s.
There is no site mechanism to alert moderators about @mentions, and due to sheer volume of messages the site operators will typically never get to see your well-intentioned message.
This thread does have better odds of being read than most, though :) cheers
I will post this every year on moderator day as a sign of respect for this place. http://cosmonautdreams.com/images/dang.jpg
it's said that perfect means lacking nothing essential to its whole. I've often speculated about the mechanics behind it, but really, it's a product that I think achieves today what apple and a lot of others aspire to be, where it does something well enough that almost nobody stops to question how. even if - or especially, when - that's probably the most interesting question of all.
how do you replicate it? you can't. that's the point.
may the odds ever be in your favour!
Just out of curiosity, are you and dang payed for caring for this forum? It seems to me it requires a lot of time and dedication.
Thanks.
Me thinks the OP is really trying to dive this point home for some reason ...
/s
Could you or Dang please explain, why this post with 118 points and 121 comments in 3 hours, about news of the day highly relevant to anybody in Tech, only shows up on page 18?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253
Just trying to understand the algo...
Those of us who complain about this highly targeted flagging just want to avoid censorship. I can't see how we need to reflect on this.
That's what's happening here.
EcommerceFlow mentioned opinions that are "very normal nationally." I don't want to assume the worst so I'm trying not to read in to that.
I see some unflagged center-right political opinions sometimes. It is stuff that a mainstream democrat would probably disagree with but find, like, not odious or offensive. Therefore I think they are just getting flagged because any political opinions here have a chance of getting flagged. This is how the website is supposed to work, if we as a community decided that mainstream political opinions were ok, the site would become a place to argue about what exactly is considered mainstream.
However, it would be disconcerting if stating biological facts led to censorship on a forum that focusses on science and technology.
The definition of "hate" has been stretched a lot over the last few years, and if that restricts discussion of facts and ideas, then it is harmful.
Even without considering trans people, it's factually untrue that "XX = woman, XY = man, and those are the only possibilities." And yet, people who stopped at high school biology will argue until they're blue in the teeth that anyone with a more nuanced take is anti-science.
There's a great deal of misunderstanding around this topic. Having open-minded, interesting and reflective discussion about topics like this should however lead to greater understanding. But that is not possible if it gets flagged and censored.
But until then, we should be free to state facts.
> The old adage “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it” was once a touchstone of liberal society. Having been involved for most of my adult life in areas of social debate, it was a phrase I once commonly heard. Not any more.
> Instead, public discourse is marked by efforts to find offence, destroy the character of opponents or ensure reason is smothered by emotional manipulation.
> -- John Deighan https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/banning-those-w...
For example, if you irrelevantly post "My software is on sale now for 10% off and here is the link!" on every story, everything in it is factual, but it's spam regardless.
I'm sure your specific facts that you want to post are in service of a particular social or political viewpoint you are trying to push, one that the people flagging find either off-topic or odious. And, given that you refuse to elaborate on what specific facts you think are banned, reveals that you think you only can convince people by being vague about what specifically you mean.
Not because I'm insincere about my views, or because I believe they are harmful - but because the activists pushing the ideological views I oppose have been demonstrably violent and destructive.
I don't think there is a guideline that bans posts from "pushing an agenda" (which would be very subjective)
"Agendas" are often ideological battlegrounds. I flag comments, even those I agree with, that I recognize from experience are going to lead to the same tired, off-topic debates and flame wars.
Lately, I've also been maintaining a personal uBlock Origin filter list to hide certain prolific rule breakers. I would love if HN had an equivalent built-in "killfile"[0] functionality for auto-hiding submissions and comments. (This has been suggested to the admins, and was seemingly received favorably, but I'm sure it's a matter of resources.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
However, the bar for creating new accounts is low, so bad actors could create lots of accounts cheaply and use them for flagging. That's why I think flagging needs to be a privilege that requires a high user "trust level" - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43559629
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.
I don’t think anyone really can be convinced to deviate from a strongly held political belief in a handful of posts. At this point I think most people with any interest in politics have already seen every path through 4 or so posts around their opinions.
Standard talking point, standard counterpoint, standard objection that the the counterpoint is not back by data, request for citations, citation, argument that the math was wrong, and by now the thread is a week old and we’ve forgotten about it.
So, I wouldn’t say it is an issue of people being bad faith or overly obstinate. It’s just a bad format. Old phpBB boards and those sorts of sites were better for this sort of stuff, despite being mediocre, because at least you could remember who was who.
I hate seeing that. It's a bad-faith argument. It's the sign of someone who's just there to argue, not to have a curious conversation. That is, it's a sign of someone who isn't within the spirit of the site guidelines.
No, I don't think this is just my personal bias against that style of posting. It's fake and juvenile, and it has no place on HN.
Another way you can tell: When they're replying to 20 comments with the same 2 or 3 talking points. That's someone who's there to do battle, not to have a conversation. They aren't really replying to the 20 comments, either - they're just spraying the same canned responses all over the place. That's not a conversation; that's a tape recorder in transmit-only mode.
HN gets tons and tons of threads that are critical of LLMs, so it's possible that the ones you're seeing get flagged are just below median quality and/or overly repetitive of previous discussions.
Maybe we just care more and notice it about that subject now. Maybe it's always been this way. But while you often leave long comments that go into how these systems work and the struggles with trying to adjust them or understand of it's even necessary (good stuff), I would be fascinated to see a blog post or something where you really give us a talking to about the state of the community and anything y'all have been trying on your end.
Just a thought, obviously, you have a whole job moderating already! Have a good day!
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
It has nothing to do with being on the side of "the opposition" or "the man," it's because those sorts of posts inevitably lead to the same, repetitive, off-topic debates and flame wars.
Flagging should be used as a cudgel against posts that break the rules. There are plenty of places on the internet to debate politics and gender; HN is not one of them.
Which is attested to by Dan repeatedly manually unflagging these posts afterwards, which is an explicit approval that these posts follow guidelines.
That's a difficult argument to make, especially without examples because at the end of the day, everything is related/relevant to everything somehow. HN's on-topicness remit is not really 'extremely relevant to techies'.
Anyway, which nation? I think we also aren’t allowed to push Communist party talking points here, despite that party being highly supported in some countries (not that I’d want to, just saying, nationally popular doesn’t mean much).
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
⁽¹⁾ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also I’d expect there to be some annoying edge cases if they tried to ban that sort of discussion. I mean, Kilmer is not a tech person. But tech people die sometimes too. Arguably discussing their life as people is outside the scope of the site. Maybe we shouldn’t have had a conversation about how great a guy Mr. Moolenaar was and just discussed the technical aspects of his life’s work. But, come on, that’d not really be a human way of responding to somebody’s death, right?
If we’re going to have these sort of lightly rule breaking threads, then I don’t think it is necessary to ask the mods to adjudicate exactly who’s technical enough to warrant one. It’s a fuzzy spectrum anyway, we have tech people, tech policy people, STEM outreach people, tech YouTube influencers, celebrities that played beloved nerd characters.
Maybe time will tell if it was actually OT.
When that time comes, if it comes, then you'd be within the guidelines to post it.
Preemptively posting it just in case it later becomes some new phenomenon is not ideal.
One thing I'd really like to see is less tactical flagging of content.
Hopefully with your additional help, people who suppress content they disagree with will be kept in check.
Open discourse is something that used to be sacrasanct in scientific and engineering circles. Over the last decade or so, free speech has been on the decline, and discussion is now very polarised along political lines.
For example, it's nearly impossible to discuss technical progress made by Elon Musk's companies without brigading by leftwing commenters, and I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away. This is self-serving behaviour by bad actors and should be addressed in order that HN is a politically-neutral forum for discussion, and not a leftwing echo chamber.
If you see things that are unfairly flagged, you can email us and we'll look at them. As long as comments/submissions are within the guidelines, we'll restore them.
We want HN to be a place where people can discuss contentious topics. This is a major reason why I've moved into an expanded role here. I think HN has been, and can continue to be, one of the better places on the internet for discussing contentious topics.
The thing to remember is the guiding principle of HN is curiosity. This place is not meant to be for ideological battle, or for trying to win arguments. It's for conversations where we can learn from each other about things we're curious about.
I've always liked to learn about the opposing side of whatever position I hold. That's why I've found HN to be so valuable, and I want it to be a place people to come to for that reason for many years into the future.
I'll do that reasonably frequently on both posts and comments, though I'm not sure how effective that is.
One sec, let's look at the endpoint ... First page (30 entries) for each shows, at this writing:
- 13 dead of 30 vouched, submissions.
- 26 dead of 30 vouched, comments.
The endpoints for the uninitiated:
I'll also admit that at times that's a protest vote against mod interactions as well.(The URLs are only visible to the owner of the UID, and I presume, moderators as well.)
Trust in forum users can be measured by various metrics - The Discourse forum software is a good example of how to do this: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-t...
This is 'drink verification can' but for messageboards.
A hard thing for people to accept, something that I think is an unstated part of the HN ethos but nevertheless real, is that it's almost always better to have no thread at all than a shitty one. Important topics will inevitably get an airing in one thread or another.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478913>
This is not for every flag, by a long shot, and occurs (checking my history) perhaps a few times a month.
Note that the follow-up to the above link also earned another dang cite. Few justifications are original...
The practice seems ... not too disruptive, and at least modestly effective. It also gives me a track record of who's turned up before.
Linking quips both keeps my own voice out of the discussion, and mutes the impact on the page itself.
That is true and I used to say it but the receipts people evade it with non-public receipts (which can maybe later somehow be audited). So I'm switching to dunking on the thing for its martinetism and pointless bureaucracy. It feels more self-indulgently righteous to boot!
Huh, I always thought it was the other way around. Anything negative about Musk also gets quickly flagged and buried. I guess we can agree that Musk is currently a lightning rod, and brigades on both sides are acting to hide (positive and negative) coverage of his actions.
All of which are subjective judgements on the content, which will naturally be reflective of a voter's political biases
When someone makes claims about how they were unfairly treated, but won't let people look at the actual situation, that's sort of a tell. If the mods had actually treated them so badly, you can be sure that it would be pointed to with neon hypertext.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oldpersonintx https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tomohawk https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=techright75
(There seems to be extreme bias or unfair flagging by users simply because "old Texan" and "techright" are "scary Conservative-sounding usernames", yet you pursue the innocents being reported rather than the botfarms mass-flagging?)
It's all very "Everyone Stalin's sending to the gulags is a criminal, though, so keep your nose down and mind your own business." God sees everything, you know.
I would like to see more discussion on HN around topics that seem unpopular here, and are perhaps politically divisive .. such as : economic inequality, climate change, demographic crunch
Somewhere between the prevailing economic malaise, cynicism and despair ... and tech-bro fan-boi greedy optimism : there might be a middle way where we can use the new technologies of AI to actually improve our lives and create wide wealth generation, and more prosperity for the middle class.
That’s why I turn on the Show Dead setting on HN, and I love that HN has that feature.
Save your upvotes for people positively contributing.
My biggest critique of this site is that the user base and moderation seems very biased with American perspectives to the detriment of the non-American user base and the quality of content as a whole.
I want to see more moderation from people around the world, with less geographic and cultural proximity to the Bay area.