
Ask YC (dang and kogir): How about some transparency? - swombat
In view of the &quot;new management&quot; listed at http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ycombinator.com&#x2F;meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news , first of all, congrats, and hope the job is not as thankless as it might have the potential to be!<p>Secondly, I (and I believe a number of others), whilst appreciating all the efforts that you guys are making to keep HN a great place to be, frequently feel baffled, hurt or just insulted by the way that moderation is applied.<p>I believe that the main reason for that is not actually bad moderation, but lack of transparency in the moderation. When you don&#x27;t know why the article you just submitted dropped off the front page suddenly, you tend to assume the worst (whatever &quot;the worst&quot; might be contextually).<p>So here is a simple plea: please, please, please, make an effort to make the moderation more transparent. This will inexorably reduce and perhaps even eventually eliminate all perceptions and claims of foul play, and help keep HN a healthy place.<p>Transparency is such a fundamental, almost universal startup value. Surely it should be an HN value too.<p>Those who hide behind secrecy and refuse to explain their actions do so at the expense of trust. Be on the right side of this debate, please, please, please.
======
dang
Right! Let me try to set you at ease, at least a little. Yes, we will make an
effort to make moderation more transparent.

In fact, we already have. It was my decision that PG should out me as
moderator, and that was mainly so I'll be able to answer users' questions.

I think your points are mostly correct and entirely understandable. Qua user,
I feel pretty similarly, so I don't anticipate much trouble seeing eye to eye
about this in the long run. I'm optimistic that we can eventually please both
the bulk and the core of the community—though that will still be far from
everybody.

Also, there's no one on the team arguing for secrecy. The question is not
whether to be more transparent, but how.

A few points from the moderation side.

You should know that what appears to be HN's "secrecy" has in reality mostly
been extremely limited bandwidth. For most of HN's existence, PG ran it at the
same time as he was building YC _plus_ having two kids. That made for an awful
lot of dropped packets. One might argue that he should have handed HN off
sooner, and one would in my opinion be completely wrong about that. So without
HN's "secrecy" there would have been no HN.

Second, it's been true for a long time that you can get answers by emailing
info@yc. (We're going to change that to hn@yc, but that's not up yet; I'll add
it to my profile when it is.) I'll be taking over the HN-related emails from
Tara, who has been valiant but will soon be relieved.

I intend to be a lot more responsive in the threads, partly because we know
that community concerns around transparency need addressing, so we'll make a
priority of it, but also for two non-obvious reasons: (1) I've written
software for navigating and moderating HN very quickly, and (2) I type faster
than PG.

Beyond that, there are a lot of questions about how to get this right. Many of
the factors aren't obvious. I have more to say about this, but this comment is
long enough, plus I'm tired and my brain hurts, and we'll have lots of
opportunities to discuss it further.

~~~
swombat
Thanks! This is just what I was hoping to hear and presages very well for the
future of HN!

Here's an example that I've observed a few times... And I'd love to know what
is actually going on in these cases...

I often submit articles with a slightly tweaked title. Eventually, a mod (you,
I guess!) gets a'fixing and the title is fixed to be exactly the one on
swombat.com (the rationale for that is slightly dubious seeing as I'm both the
writer and the submitter in some of those cases, but let's pass on that!).
What I've noticed several times is that at the same time as the title being
fixed, the article suddenly dropped 10 or sometimes many more places...

It's easy to interpret that as "moderator didn't like my article!"... But what
is it really?

~~~
dang
I don't remember any specific examples, but there are different sorts of
moderation decisions we make, and it's not uncommon to make more than one of
them at once. If you want to discuss specific examples, email me.

Also, I'm going to be the head moderator for a while, but not the only
moderator. I'll answer the questions, but not necessarily do everything.

~~~
pygy_
It would be great if you could allow users to flag inappropriate titles
(linkbait / editorialized), rather than systematically reverting.

~~~
dang
Title changes are a topic unto themselves and we'll probably have a dedicated
discussion about them. We're not going to change the policy; the policy has
far, far more benefit than cost for HN. The trouble is that the costs are
visible ("hey who changed my title") while the benefits are all just taken for
granted. With that kind of accounting, anything will seem bad.

What we can do is have a way for title changes to show up for users who want
to know about them.

~~~
pygy_
Sometimes, the original title is meaningless, and either the subtitle or a
short, neutral summary are more informative.

Some flexibility in that regard would improve my HN experience.

~~~
dang
We often combine a title and subtitle for this reason. What we strive not to
do is make stuff up. The key to a good HN title change is that it is made out
of pieces already there: doc, h1, and h2 elements, mostly; or the first
sentence of the story, if necessary. If the original title is misleading or
linkbait, that is how we change it. But if the original title isn't misleading
or linkbait, we don't change it at all.

------
pkteison
I don't want more transparency. It just gives people something concrete to
argue over, and you can't please the haters, so don't waste your time trying.

~~~
baddox
That sounds like an interesting twist on the concept of "security through
obscurity," and is equally misguided. If the moderators are doing things the
community doesn't like, exposing a log of moderator actions will hasten course
correction.

Of course, that presumes that the moderators care what the community thinks
and are willing to change their behavior accordingly. I _do_ presume that's
the case.

~~~
IgorPartola
Very different from security through obscurity. The problem here is that a
vocal minority can sway opinions and make it seem like lots of people are
behind something. One lengthy disagreeing rant might seem like a one off. Ten
lengthy rants will likely cause a moderator to pause and listen and maybe even
respond.

In the end, the mods will need to decide how to handle shit and while input
from mere mortals is a good thing, it is not required for them to do their
jobs. We already have very democratic tools here and lots of power: more so
than inmost other societies. If you really disagree with something, by all
means speak up. But mods are not elected officials representing your
interests. They are not here to enact the will of the people. They are here to
maintain civility and ensure that the rules are followed.

------
mabbo
I always loved the SomethingAwful "Leper Colony" page. It was a list of who
was put on probation, banned, or permabanned, and a link to what they did to
do this. It had a quick explanation of why it happened.

It was a great way, as a lurker, to get an understanding of the rules via
watching others fail to follow them.

This is a different beast here, as no one is paying to be a member, but I
wonder if there isn't something to learn from how that page operated.

~~~
ggreer
I'm not a huge fan of The Awful Forums, but I do like their probation system.
Right now, a moderator on HN can either permanently take away a user's
privileges or do nothing. Probation is a nice middle ground. If the user
persists in behaving badly, then the banhammer can be brought out.

It's also useful to have a notice such as, "This user's commenting privileges
were suspended for 100 hours for this comment." By making the punishment
public, the commenter is (hopefully) shamed into behaving better in the
future. And like you said, it may even prevent others from behaving similarly.

~~~
lotharbot
This is also why I liked that comment points used to be displayed -- you could
learn what a good comment was by looking for the ones with zillions of points,
and also what a bad comment was by looking for the ones that sat at 1-2 points
while responses to it scored much higher.

~~~
Too
Why? Are you here for discussion or for karma score? Isn't it enough that
downvoted comments become gray?

With displayed score you end up with digg/reddit where people just post short
memes and try to get a high score displayed in the easiest way imaginable.

~~~
lotharbot
> _" Isn't it enough that downvoted comments become gray?"_

Nope. That doesn't show you the difference between a barely-passable comment
and an excellent one.

I learned a lot during my early HN days, when comment scores were visible,
simply by looking at what sort of comments tended to score 5 points vs 1
point, or 15 points vs 5 points, or 40 points vs 15 points. Here on HN, "just
post short memes" tends to be met with negative signals; thoughtful, helpful,
and accurate responses are met with positive signals. I found it helped to be
able to see that, and I think many newer HN commenters have the same
misconception as you do because they haven't had that same training.

------
lukasm
I don't think the problem lies in transparency. The problem is scaling the
community. How to keep the signal high? Naturally, people are trying to
organise things by adding rules when you simply cannot relay on "level of
trust". Sadly, there is a hidden cost with every regulation. For example, I
stopped actively participating in StackOverflow. I pine the days when SO was a
lot smaller community with high signal to noise ratio, but, more importantly,
it had that human feel.

These days, it's very different. Topic are being parsed and filtered by
robotic moderator that cannot possibly let something even remotely option-
based slip through. Comment that are relevant, but with subtle jokes are
deleted. I remember when Joel and Jeff were actively answering questions to
have the critical mass. Now that answers and questions would be closed or
moderated. e.g. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/652788/what-is-the-
worst-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/652788/what-is-the-worst-real-
world-macros-pre-processor-abuse-youve-ever-come-across)

~~~
RKoutnik
I agree, the main site seems to be 90% "Write code for beginning programmers
who are too lazy to do any research on their own."

However, the chatrooms are an excellent place to have those opinion-based off-
topic discussions. I find I've spent far more time idling away the hours in JS
chat and learned far more.

------
ijk
I think a bigger issue is that the front page is _too_ important. It's always
going to be the page with the most views, but compared to most other
aggregation sites, Hacker News has very little memory and makes access to the
archives difficult.

This is part of what shapes its community, of course. There's probably at
least some reasoning behind why it works that way, but it seems to me that the
lack of memory distorts the importance of the front page.

------
throwaway13qf85
Is it possible that it sometimes doesn't have anything to do with moderation
at all?

Every submission has a big 'flag' button on it. I don't know exactly what that
does when clicked, but I assume it tends to make submissions drop further into
obscurity.

Some topics that get a lot of exposure (the NSA and bitcoin come to mind) are
likely to get heavily flagged when they appear, which probably doesn't look
much different to moderation.

~~~
swombat
It's absolutely possible, perhaps even likely. The point is, without any
transparency, we don't know. People have a fairly reliable tendency to assume
the worst option - the simple cure for that is transparency.

~~~
mbesto
I'm gonna play the devil's advocate here. Obscurity might actually be a good
thing for this community.

> _The point is, without any transparency, we don 't know._

But either way we are told to use flagging functionality, so we should
continue doing it. Just because you or I, _think_ that an article should be
flagged and therefore taken off the site, doesn't mean it should. We cast our
vote and move on. I'm curious as to what your expectations are of the people
on the site when more transparency is involved? That to me is the glaring
question - how do we create an environment where the behavior of the community
is consistently following the rules?

My increasing frustration with HN has nothing to do with the technology or the
moderation, but more so about the other 20% of the people whose contribution
adds zero value (whether that be they are upvoting terrible comments,
submitting unrelated material, or not following guidelines). I believe you and
I are in the same boat - we are extremely passionate about seeing HN succeed.
Our environment dictates that if we continue to follow the guidelines and
promoting the same values, the community will thrive. If everyone does this,
then the community succeeds, regardless of whether moderation exists. Perhaps
we should be focusing more on educating bad actors on why they shouldn't act
out of line, rather than question the good actors (mods) intentions?

------
mplewis
I'd like to see a moderation log like on Lobste.rs [1]. They list all the
actions their moderators take and why. This includes renaming posts, deleting
posts, and banning users.

Their description of the moderation log: "All moderator actions on this site
are visible to everyone and the identities of those moderators are made
public. While the individual actions of a moderator may cause debate, there
should be no question about who the moderator was or whether they had an
ulterior motive for those actions."

[1] [https://lobste.rs/moderations](https://lobste.rs/moderations)

------
steveklabnik
Yup, I agree 100%. The lack of transparency is incredibly frustrating, for all
of the reasons mentioned above.

I wish I had more to say than "+1," but I wanted to give more than just an
upvote. "you tend to assume the worst" really resonates with me.

This comment went from +3 to (currently) -1. Interesting.

------
olalonde
> Secondly, I (and I believe a number of others), whilst appreciating all the
> efforts that you guys are making to keep HN a great place to be, frequently
> feel baffled, hurt or just insulted by the way that moderation is applied.

Could you give some concrete examples? Articles can get dropped off the front
page when many people click the flag link (i.e. it's not always driven by the
moderators). Also, I believe submissions with a high comments to up vote ratio
are weighted down (the rationale being that it usually signals a controversial
topic prone to flame wars). There have been cases of questionable hell
banning, but this can usually be resolved by contacting the mods privately
AFAIK.

------
mschuster91
Might be worth a try to publish _all_ the stuff affecting ranking, like
site/domain-specific penalties, (hell)bans etc.

~~~
jmspring
I wonder if ranking is domain specific or maybe too many from a specific site.
There was a time where a whole slew of medium.com articles were being
submitted, it was a little old.

I would hope sites that are just link aggregators are given less weight while
sites (like medium) that are prone to having interesting content but get over
submitted have an adaptive factor.

~~~
Uehreka
Someone once published a statistical analysis of the HN front page, where they
were able to distill which domains are penalized. Medium.com was one of them.
The post itself was quickly flagged and dropped from the front page, and I
can't remember the link, sorry :/

~~~
kogir
The link is [http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-
really...](http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-
works.html)

I subscribe to Ken's blog and even sent the link to Daniel:

    
    
      Wow. This was some seriously good research and nailed some of the penalty
      numbers exactly. I mean, he did basically have the ranking formula and only
      had to solve for the variables, but it's still much better than anything 
      else I've seen.
    

It fell prey to the ring detector before either Daniel or I saw it on HN.

------
akerl_
Posts drop off the front page because of a variety of reasons, from flagging
by users to being hit with the penalty for having a poor upvote / comment
ratio.

It's not the staff's fault that people jump to assume An Act Of Malicious
Moderation if a story drops.

~~~
swombat
So why not be transparent about those reason? Who does it hurt to have a
heavily flagged post display "this post was flagged by 15 people", or to let a
post that's against the guidelines be identified as such?

~~~
aaron695
I don't think it's necessarily that simple.

Many people on HN run on a logic system, many seem to be emotional.

So when someone post some cute puppy that has cancer logical people might flag
it. Many puppies die of cancer everyday, we don't hate said puppy but we just
like to look at the bigger picture ie curing cancer and perhaps not eating
animals if we love them so much.

But emotive people don't get it and I can see it quickly turning into a why do
people on HN hate puppies so much conversation.

Plus logical people don't want to look like assholes.

Meh, but who knows maybe it'd create constructive conversation.

------
jontonsoup
It might be interesting to expose the algorithm more (not saying the entire
thing, but if auto penalties are applied which ones).

------
samth
One of the best ways to increase transparency would be to make the source for
HN available. There's already an official GitHub repo for issues -- why not
have the source there too?

~~~
kogir
The source is available at
[http://arclanguage.org/install](http://arclanguage.org/install)

It's not 100% the same as what runs Hacker News, but it's very close.

~~~
samth
The date on `news.arc` in that tarball is from 2009. I know a bunch of changes
have happened since then, pending comments being just the latest.

------
kogir
On this I defer to Daniel, and will help implement whatever he thinks is best.

------
kylelibra
Does HN have any set community guidelines written out?

~~~
wingerlang
There is a link named "guidelines" at the bottom of the page.
[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
vilhelm_s
These are rather out of date though. E.g. it says "Otherwise please use the
original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait", which does not really
reflect the current policy of "use original title no matter what".

~~~
lawnchair_larry
I would love for that one to be kept as-is, and for HN moderators to actually
follow their own guidelines on that.

When submitters change titles for clarity, and moderators revert it to an
obscure original title that no longer has context, HN loses value.

------
wudf
rapid feedback is important for the user just like it is for the developer

