
Analyzing HN moderation and censorship - ddevault
https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html
======
flavio81
In this thread, some people are complaining of moderators downvoting (lowering
the rank) of some submissions over others; and at least one person says "let
the readers decide". I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the
readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. No thanks, i
prefer HN due to the behind-the-scenes 'curation' or choice of content, which
so far usually gives very interesting, sometimes _exciting_ news, posts,
articles and "Show HN"s.

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.

~~~
andrewguenther
I've found moderation on HN to be a bit heavy handed recently. Specifically
when it comes to the issue of sexism in SV. No matter the opinion, posts on
this seem to get removed shortly after reaching the front page.

Question for the mods: Why? It doesn't appear to be a bias towards either
side. Is the perception just that people are tied of hearing about it? Why not
let the users decide that?

~~~
wvenable
Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's
essentially the forum equivalent of candy. If you want your forum to have some
nutritional value than you can't let the candy topics run rampant no matter
how much people seem to want them.

~~~
andrewguenther
I think that makes sense. But how much is too much? Say you have a very high
post volume on one side of an issue, so you start moderating more heavily. Do
you allow posts through representing the other side? Is that "fair"?

~~~
dec0dedab0de
I believe there is an automatic penalty if the comment count goes above the
vote count beyond a certain percentage

~~~
ZenoArrow
Makes sense. That's the clearest indication I've seen of contentious topics on
HN (comment count higher than the topic vote count).

------
ploggingdev
The voting ring detector is in need of a serious upgrade. There are so many
cases of vote solicitation by people with meaningful social media following
and their posts even make the front page. It's mostly the Product Hunt style
"Hey we launched on HN, check us out" which is code for "upvote my post".
People have stopped directly linking to the post submission for fear of
tripping the voting ring detector, but they either just say "We launched on
HN" or link to /newest. Seeing such posts make the front page makes me
question the effectiveness of the voting ring detector beyond catching the
obvious ones.

A shoutout to `minimaxir for being one of the only people constantly calling
out others for such bs. As you can imagine, people get offended for being
called out and I remember at least 2 instances of him being treated rudely for
doing so on twitter.

If anyone comes across such submissions, please report them to the mods by
sending them an email. I'll admit I have not been doing what I suggested, but
going forward I will.

~~~
dang
> _many cases of vote solicitation [...] and their posts even make the front
> page_

That last bit is the critical one. Vote solicitation that doesn't go anywhere
is an annoyance, but fake upvotes getting otherwise lame content on the front
page is a threat. If you (or anyone) see cases of this, I wish you would send
them to hn@ycombinator.com. We investigate, and can usually figure something
out one way or the other.

From my perspective—but of course we don't see everything—HN's anti-voting-
ring software is now so strict that the main thing we have to do is turn it
_off_ when a submission is good enough. It's not uncommon for there to be a
high-quality project that someone has put months or years into, and then
naively tries to promote on HN (edit: I mean by asking friends to upvote).
Often people think that's what they're supposed to do. (If you think the
opposite should be obvious, try communicating anything to a large-enough
audience. The vast majority never get the message.) If we didn't override the
voting ring detector in such cases, some really good work would be lost to the
audience here, which wouldn't benefit HN. Of course this is rare enough; most
ring-voted submissions aren't very good. But years of working on this problem
have taught me that the best voting ring detector would not be one that
penalizes submissions; it would just turn all ring-votes into no-ops.

~~~
archagon
Wait, are you suggesting that people _shouldn’t_ post their own stuff to HN?
Or by “promote on HN”, do you mean posting on Twitter and telling people to go
upvote?

~~~
dang
Definitely not suggesting that! Sorry for the ambiguity. Of course it's fine
for people to share their own work here (assuming it's on topic—but anything
intellectually interesting is on topic).

By 'naively tries to promote on HN' I mean things like asking friends to
upvote and passing links around on Twitter. Those tactics don't work (or at
least as far as I know they don't) and usually hurt the submission rather than
help it. Does that make sense?

~~~
archagon
Yeah, that’s what I figured, but I wanted to clarify since PH actually does
seem to do it the other way. Thanks!

------
timthelion
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 a story on the front page is to get lucky
or gang up with your friends.

~~~
pjc50
And as mentioned, people will _definitely_ use the flag feature to get rid of
controversial articles they don't like. Anything about sexism will get flagged
into oblivion, for example.

~~~
tptacek
Plenty of people who are deeply concerned about sexism in this industry _also_
flag those stories, because it only takes 2-3 misogynist trolls to create a
300-comment shitshow out of them. There are still kinds of threads that this
site simply can't do well, and it's better we not pretend we can until the
guidelines and mod tools evolve to actually make them work here.

~~~
eropple
And, to underline, we have a lot more than 2-3 misogynist trolls in these
parts. Reflexive rich-white-dude defensiveness is perhaps HN's greatest
challenge.

~~~
astura
Hopefully they are just trolls, trolls just post comments that are
inflammatory to get people riled up, not because they actually mean what they
post. If they actually are misogynistic and think they their contributions are
reasonable and welcome, that's a different problem.

------
minimaxir
Another HN tool moderators use that isn't mentioned in the post is the second-
chance pool, where moderators will rescue a post which did not receive many
upvotes and give it placement on the front page for a bit of time.

~~~
alekratz
Where is this documented? Not trying to be snippy - I have no idea what powers
the moderators have in this realm. Maybe HN could benefit from some lobste.rs-
esque moderation transparency.

~~~
sillysaurus3
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 to mindlessly upvote it.

The results speak for themselves: HN is now almost a top-1000 site by traffic.

They had to be phenomenal. I don't think many people appreciate just how
difficult this was to pull off, or how much they work their asses off every
single day. If they ignored HN for even a week, it would deteriorate
noticeably.

Yet technology is at least as important. The fact that our upvotes _do_ matter
makes the situation unique -- although the mods can determine the relative
weights of stories, we can still push a story upwards if enough of us are
interested, and the story fits the site's original goal of gratifying
intellectual curiosity.

There is no company anywhere in the world like this. At this point, HN
practically _defines_ our culture. When news stories say things like "so-and-
so story about <technology> has been making the rounds on social media," at
least some of them are talking about HN now. And your coworkers probably hear
about the tech they use at least partly from HN.

The sole reason they're in this position is because they deserve to be. I hope
they stay selective. As to being secretive, we should let them choose. If they
want to reveal, fine. If not, fine. They've earned it. Even still, they've
been remarkably transparent.

~~~
aaron-lebo
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.

~~~
sillysaurus3
If Dan and Scott were kings, they would be fucking epic. Best monarchs ever.
It's hard to think of anyone who cares more about fairness, but clever enough
to decide for themselves. And they're usually right. I think I can count on
one hand the number of mistakes they've made that even remotely mattered. And
from a strategic standpoint, that number is effectively zero.

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](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](https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium))
as far as I know.

[https://github.com/sctb/lumen](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.

~~~
feelin_googley
[https://github.com/sctb/woe](https://github.com/sctb/woe)

Indeed this _is_ cool.

To compile on BSD, I used

    
    
       gcc -static -std=c89 -Wall -pedantic -o woe woe.c -lm

~~~
sctb
Do you mind opening an issue or just emailing me (scott at yc) the error you
see?

Edit: fixed, thanks!

------
losteverything
I never gave thought to the moderator position till this analysis.

I wonder if it is a full time job. Do other sites have full time moderators?

Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only
imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like
data entry jobs in the past.

To compare and contrast, if you are a construction worker making residential
housing, you and see its effect on people and humanity. Year after year and
perhaps decade after decade you can drive by and know your work helped a
family. Yet the effort of a moderator goes away within hours and is hard (for
me) to see the long lasting value.

This write up helped me think about a topic i never thought of before. Thanks

(HN moderators: i know u make this site a good read. Thanks)

~~~
ansible
_Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only
imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like
data entry jobs in the past._

I'm one of the moderators over on reddit.com/r/AskEngineers.

It is work... that I don't get paid for. Or any kind of reward, really.

But I'm doing it because I want to promote high-quality discussion on various
engineering topics. I'm glad when we can help each other out by answering
questions.

To be a moderator, ideally you're in it for the long term, by trying to guide
your community in a good direction, educate people, uphold standards of good
and civil discussion.

~~~
losteverything
Do you manage time so that there is planned downtime? Like no moderating
weekends or 8/40/5? Or is it a mostly 24/7 look-at-all-new-posts thing

~~~
ansible
There's only 65K subscribers, so it isn't a huge sub compared to others. And
/r/AskEngineers is a pretty well-behaved bunch for the most part, so it isn't
too hard.

I'm usually checking the new queue and moderation queue a couple times per
day.

It's good to have multiple active moderators, who are in different timezones
to provide better 24/7 coverage.

------
gnicholas
I was actually going to build a tool that scrapes HN every couple minutes and
looks for stories that were hot (on the front page) and then drops by 20+
slots. I've happened to be involved in a couple threads where this
inexplicably happened, and I was unhappy to see the discussion being muted
(people previously involved continued commenting, but no new people saw/joined
the thread). I was going to show the buried posts on a site called
toohotforhn.com, so that people could go to find the discussions that they
might have otherwise missed. These days, much of it is around silicon valley
and the treatment of women/minorities, but it could also include stories that
are negative on YC companies that get buried (inadvertently, perhaps) as well.

Others have pointed out that if you want more discussion on X, you can go find
it elsewhere. The point is that I want to see what HNers think about X — which
is why I think a tool like this would be useful.

~~~
dang
Why don't you just look at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/active](https://news.ycombinator.com/active)?
(via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/lists](https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)).
Most if not almost all of those stories show up there.

Btw since you brought up the point, we moderate stories less, not more, when
they're about YC or YC-funded companies. That's literally the first rule of HN
moderation:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20yc%20less%20not%20mo...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20yc%20less%20not%20more&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

That doesn't mean we don't moderate them at all, since the internet would
drive a truck through a cheap ploy like that. But we do err on that side,
since keeping the good faith of the community is more important than any
particular story.

~~~
gnicholas
Checking /active makes sense, but once the rank for a story plummets, there's
essentially a cap on comment activity. New people don't get brought in, and
over time the existing commenters dwindle. So I'm not sure that would quite
accomplish what I'm looking for.

Regarding YC companies, I totally understand and trust that you and other
moderators are not killing negative stories on YC companies. But I've noticed
that sometimes these stories just disappear, and I don't know if this has
anything to do with the fact that YC founders likely have high karma and are
likely friends with other users with high karma. This is why I used the word
"inadvertently" in my description of this — I truly think it may just be an
artifact of how the algorithms interact and the fact that YC founders may end
up having more clout than the average commenter. Basically, I don't know what
powers are unlocked at different levels (I know new users can't downvote
comments, for example), and I wonder if high-karma users have powers that I
(~2700) do not have. And even if they don't have explicit powers, does their
downvoting or flagging have a much bigger impact on whether comments or
stories are killed?

Thanks for weighing in. You and the other folks who handle hn@ emails have
always been prompt when I emailed with questions.

~~~
dang
Higher karma doesn't unlock any powers after the downvote threshold (500).

If you have concerns about any specific stories I'd be happy to take a look.
It's best to email hn@ycombinator.com because we don't see most comments that
get posted here.

------
interfixus
The harsh and angry negativity of some comments in this thread is difficult to
understand. As others have pointed out, and as should go without saying, this
is a private site with whichever ruleset its owners choose to impose, take it
or leave it.

And besides, the mods are making a tremendous job of it. I wildly disagree
with lots of their decisions, and probably with great part of their general
outlook on life, but I really can't fault their taste or professionalism, so
thank you, guys.

The one cowardly thing going on here is the doing of users, not of moderators:
The sad and unworthy tendency of some to downvote comments to oblivion purely
for opinions expressed. Now _that_ is a kind of grassroots censorship which we
could do without.

~~~
bogomipz
>"The harsh and angry negativity of some comments in this thread is difficult
to understand. As others have pointed out, and as should go without saying,
this is a private site with whichever ruleset its owners choose to impose,
take it or leave it."

I find this comment difficult to understand. The success and value of a site
like HN largely depends on a community who submits stories and engages in
discussion about those stories.

Stating "This is a private site" and "take it or leave it" is not only
unnecessarily dismissive but its a false dichotomy. Liking something and
wanting to see it improve are not mutually exclusive.

------
trgv
_Here are some posts whose flags I consider questionable:

Harvey, the Storm That Humans Helped Cause (23 points)

ES6 imports syntax considered harmful (12 points)

White-Owned Restaurants Shamed for Serving Ethnic Food (33 points)

The evidence is piling up – Silicon Valley is being destroyed (27 points)_

Personally I'm glad all of these posts were flagged.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
You might disagree with them, but were they violating the guidelines? Rules
should not be selectively enforced, and made-up rules should _definitely_ not
be enforced.

~~~
trgv
I think they were violating guidelines in that they qualified as off-topic. Is
that worth a flag? I'm not sure.

But I don't think they should have been flagged "because I disagree with
them."

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
They're not off-topic according to the guidelines so far as I understand them.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
The website that publishes my stats
([https://hn.0x2237.club](https://hn.0x2237.club)) is getting smashed. This is
largely because collecting stats is expensive and I devote most of the CPU
time to that. Rest assured, stats are still being gathered, and you should be
able to browse them when it cools down a bit. Sorry for the inconvenience!

------
mcguire
Then, there is the case of 'On Whose Authority ([http://z.caudate.me/on-whose-
authority/](http://z.caudate.me/on-whose-authority/)), the HN discussion of
which was killed while the discussion of Rich Hickey's response
([https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_au...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_authority/do1olag))
was ongoing and both were on the front page.

~~~
tptacek
Interpersonal drama gets flagged off the site routinely. You see the same
thing happen when a "story" is really an extrapolation of one person's tweet.
I remember flagging that post myself.

~~~
mcguire
Did you also flag the response?

~~~
tptacek
I don't remember, but if I saw it, I did. I try to flag all drama stories.

~~~
mcguire
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425632](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425632)

------
oftenbanned
Article doesn’t mention what I believe is one mod tool: shadow banning
accounts based on IP. I had a bunch of accounts get shadowbanned for no
evident reason and after a while I deduced it was based on using the account
from a particular cafe’s WiFi. I just created this account and if I go use it
from that place I will be banned again by some automated process.

~~~
willvarfar
Why did you have so many accounts in the first place? How many is "a bunch"?

~~~
logfromblammo
I spend enough time slacking off with just one account. I can't imagine
getting anything done at all with two or three.

Perhaps that is done to avoid the rate limiter?

I can usually only make _five_ posts in one 8-hour span, and then the sixth
attempt says, "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks. Also, don't
count the number of posts tptacek can make in one thread in one hour and
compare it to your total for the entire week, or it might raise your blood
pressure."

I am barred from having more than half a conversation in one day, while it
seems that [some] others can post as often as they can hit "[reply]". So yes,
I do feel censored on HN. The article didn't even mention the post-rate
limits.

~~~
ibebnndagan
I've seen threads where he and his possey made up 50% of the comments,
controlling the narrative and rallying their forces to down vote flag those
who had the tenacity to disagree with them.

Also since you mentioned a particular user your comment will be removed. Funny
how that works.

~~~
logfromblammo
I'm glad to see parent comment back from [dead], because I have also noticed
it. That's why I mentioned that particular account in the first place. You can
search _in this very thread_ to see (as of now) _27 posts_ by that account,
one admitting to robot-assisted vigilantism against certain types of users--
namely racists, misogynists, and homophobes. One of the other matches mentions
that he can occasionally be quite mean.

I can recall at least one instance where he replied to me directly, and I
wanted to engage, but couldn't, because I was "posting too fast".

It's the network neutrality issue writ small. Some people have fast lanes on
this site, and others have slow lanes. I don't like it here, and it _annoys_
me when I notice it. If it becomes the status quo for the whole network, you
can be sure that I will be engaging in "shovel vigilantism" in the dark of
some nights. Freedoms of speech and publication are no longer supportive of
liberty and equality when certain favored people are allocated 10000 times as
much speech as most other people are usually allowed, and drown out all other
voices with their _sheer volume_ rather than the _merit of their claims_.

------
MichaelMoser123
Each news outlet serves some purpose, that's why people bother to maintain it;
so it has some degree of editorial policy (determined by the collective action
of the editors).

I for one think that I am spending too much time here (relative to the stuff
that I learn). (Lets see how long I can keep off site, after all this _is_
adictive ;-)

I would appreciate it if someone would come up with a filter, HN on tech
subjects only, and no politics and business stories - a mere title line is not
enough to figure out the context (but they do that on purpose, to involve more
people that way, don't they :-) actually I guess that would be easy to do with
NLP tagging...

One thing that I dislike with both HN and reddit style moderation system is
that the subject of the editorial action has no idea that he/she has been
edited out. I think that actually gives the pleasant feeling of being in an
insane asylum. Anybody can relate ti this sentiment?

------
throw2016
A larger wordview beyond a group think bubble of SV is needed to represent the
tech industry. A lack of transparency always ends up empowering people behind
the scenes who then have to make casual judgements of entire swaths of people
and opinion. This is bad both for moderators and discussion.

Fortunately its relatively easy to launch a site like HN. A problem is a
solution waiting to happen. If there is competition and it affects HN they are
not going to sit back, there will be more transparency. However good something
is competition is essential to keep people on their toes, so there is a
largish lacuna here for the health of the industry.

Having said that any popular site will have the exact same issues HN does, so
if the point is merely to change decision makers by those jockeying for
influence then its a pointless exercise of exaggerating issues to gain
influence, ironically how most new products are launched on HN these days.

------
alekratz
I've noticed that a lot of submissions have had their titles changed recently
(past month or two). I wasn't aware that users were allowed to change their
own titles - I was chalking this up to moderators "curating" articles.

How often do users change the titles of their submissions? There's no way to
tell.

------
grandalf
This a great analysis. I would love to see a public page displaying title
changes so that I could click "request explanation" and the mods could offer
an explanation for those every day based on reader interest.

Whatever is going on to achieve it, HN is a great online community, and so
maybe that is due to the moderation. Sometimes I wonder if it might be _in
spite of_ the moderation, but who knows :)

the precipitous drop that happens to stories after their titles have been
changed shows a very strong editorial bias going on. I think there is a
general strategy of keeping highly controversial political topics off of HN.

The question is, when does this sort of censorship constitute an ideological
crackdown in its own right.

------
mschuster91
What I personally dislike is the "spam filter". I sometimes hit it when
participating in multiple threads and it says "You're submitting too fast,
please slow down" \- and it does not reset itself after sometimes over 8
hours.

~~~
dang
That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when
they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site
guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool
but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site.

I took a quick look at your recent history and it seems fine, so I'll take the
rate limit off. But to prevent it from kicking in again, please stick to
civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I recall that we had to ask you many times in the past not to violate that,
but hopefully it's all in the past now and things will be nice and guideliney
going forward.

------
nickjj
I always felt like there was something weird about rankings when it came to
HN.

I recall submitting something that got around 7 upvotes in 30 minutes but it
got dead and buried and never presented itself on the front page. The content
wasn't edgy and it wasn't clickbait.

But a few days later I saw an unrelated post with 2 upvotes after 1 full hour
and it was magically on the front page.

If a post with 2 upvotes after 1 hour can be on the front page but a post with
7 upvotes in 30 minutes is not, then surely there needs to be some type of
manual intervention happening. Glad to see there's data showing this now and
I'm not going crazy.

------
timcederman
Interesting to see the ability to take away downvoting is not mentioned. After
downvoting one person (who made multiple offensive contributions) in a single
thread, I noticed later I could no longer downvote comments (but the downvote
button still appeared). Ultimately, I think the secretive and subjective
approach to moderation at Hacker News has resulted in a positive outcome, but
it's still surprising to run into the limits on occasion.

------
angersock
There are two other features not listed: submission throttling for comments
(which I suspect mods have some influence on) and slow banning (making the
site slow for flagged users).

For a different approach to moderation, check out Lobsters.

~~~
dang
Re rate-limiting see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513929).
Slow-banning was dropped years ago.

------
Kiro
> title change and derank

I don't understand why the articles shown that had to their titles changed
also were deranked.

------
epx
I used to worry about downvotes, now I find solace in having annoyed the
downvoters.

~~~
dogruck
I agree that if you never get down votes, then you're not adding maximum
value.

~~~
epx
That was inspiring! Thank you for that.

------
matt4077
Moderators don't "censor".

They _moderate_.

------
chasing
"Censorship by moderators"

How about:

"Curation by moderators"

~~~
spash
"Censorship by Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China"

How about:

"Curation by Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China"

~~~
arkades
There’s a difference between a state actor controlling the whole of the public
arena and a private individual controlling their own privately-sponsored
forum; the latter allows you to crack open a blog and flog whatever opinion
you want, and the former does not. I admit there’s some gray area for
something like google, which by virtue of its size and role as intermediary
has censorship abilities approaching governmental levels.

Freedom of Speech is a restriction on the government, not a duty on the part
of private individuals to let you come in and piss on their living room
carpet.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties.
Don't be misled - it _is_ censorship. The law doesn't protect this kind of
speech, which means they are _legally permitted_ to participate in censorship,
but it is censorship all the same. Yours is a common and poor argument for
justifying this behavior. There are plenty of things which are both _legal_
and _immoral_. I would prefer to participate in a transparently moderated
community where the rules are clearly defined and aren't selectively enforced.
This makes for a better community.

They don't have a _legal obligation_ to behave this way, but that needs to
stop being used as an excuse to shut down discussions on how to make the
community better.

~~~
_jal
This ends up being a debate about word choice, and I normally hate that. But
there is good reason to distinguish the two carefully, and the easiest way to
do that is word choice.

I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick
them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to
ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the
state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but
nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still
talk on thousands of other places.

I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down
discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just
listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians
defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as
if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem
being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it
and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
>I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick
them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to
ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the
state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but
nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still
talk on thousands of other places.

I would argue that this is definitely censorship. Just because you can go
somewhere else doesn't mean you aren't being censored - you are being denied
access to the HN audience. Somewhere else isn't going to have the same
audience. And that audience isn't making the decision - a small number of
moderators are. But you're right that this is just down to pedantic word
choice, feel free to discard this thread of the discussion if you'd rather not
push the matter further.

>I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down
discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just
listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians
defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as
if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem
being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it
and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.

I'm not here touting free speech like it's a legal right I have as a submitter
and an obligation HN has as a publisher. Instead I'm touting it as a damn good
idea that makes for a better medium for discussion and suggeting HN embraces
it anyway.

~~~
_jal
> feel free to discard this thread of the discussion if you'd rather not push
> the matter further

Think you're right. You completely ignored my point, so this is pointless. But
the root issue is not different than, either through ignorance or deceptive
calculation, claiming that copyright infringement is theft. It is a category
error that negatively effects people's understanding of what's going on, so it
matters.

------
vormalpg
Moderators should in no way be able to bury posts or even nudge them
downwards. This is a cowardly way to try to control discussion. If it isn't
explicitly against the site rules, let the readers decide.

~~~
eterm
I've long come to accept that HN is a curated source, the voting is a kind of
false-democracy to make it appear more democratic than it is.

Yes, likely >90% of the site is done through voting, but a significant amount
of pruning and bumping clearly also occurs.

~~~
tptacek
It's not a democracy at all. User votes are one signal the site uses among
many. It's been like that since day one.

~~~
rtpg
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.

~~~
tptacek
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 better.

~~~
eropple
I've given the mods here some grief and I think there's a lot of room to
improve, but Thomas is one hundred percent right here. Graham's I-don't-have-
time-for-this moderation was a much, much worse thing for the community.

------
tptacek
Paywalled articles are explicitly _not_ against the rules.

~~~
SloopJon
"It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds."

With the weakening of the Google workaround that's baked into the HN header,
more and more submissions are going to run afoul of that condition.

------
harlanji
It's ridiculous that mods can hide my comments but I can't delete them. If a
post is removed, I should have the anility to revoke my license to tue copy
and have it removed. Would DMCA cover that?

~~~
striking
There's the EU right to be forgotten if a company does business in the EU, and
the ability to ask the mods to delete things, which they do.

------
ahdiheje
Also posts I made were deleted, not even allowed to be seen even as 'dead'

~~~
sctb
If you would email us links to those comments at hn@ycombinator.com we can
take a look. That's not a moderation practice.

------
deadmetheny
>Consider appointing one or two moderators from the community, ideally people
with less bias towards SV or startup culture

While I agree that this would be a great idea, it's laughable in that, as a
service run by Y Combinator, it's always going to be for startup hucksters
primarily and for the rest of the tech industry and Internet at large
secondarily.

~~~
tptacek
This site is overwhelmingly populated by people outside of startupland.

------
ahdiheje
I am being auto shadow banned. Just look at dead comments to know how heavy
moderated opinion is on HN.

HN controls what views they allow on their forum, certainly not a place to
have a free and open discussion.

------
ibebnndagan
Shadow banning isn't rare.

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?

