Is it me or mods are actively hiding everything that is critical of the current admin? This post is 6 hours late, 308 points and at the bottom of the 3rd page. This is not the first post that is either flagged or just made invisible. Is HN still a place we can trust?
If you take a look at those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Trust as you please, but we're moderating HN the same way we always have.
Edit: Actually we wouldn't expect or ask anyone to trust in the first place. I do think it's reasonable to ask regular users to familiarize themselves with the principles by which we moderate the site. Then if you see something that doesn't fit those principles, or if you want to make a case for different principles, we have something to discuss.
These principles go back a long time and have held up well in terms of preserving HN for its intended purpose over the years. If you (or anyone) want to familiarize yourself with them, see the link I marked above. It contains a partial list, and pointers to lots of past explanations.
These posts have a high political index, which given America's current culture wars tends to bring out the kind of behavior which none of us want on HN.
It's a damn tough balancing act.
Also, look at my post history, I'm pretty strongly anti-DOGE. I'm defending Dang because I love HN and appreciate what he is doing under extremely tough conditions.
Moderation is decentralized, downvoted comments tend to disappear.
Flagging is a power people who have a lot of karma have, if you think are one of them you can vouch (unflag) for a comment.
There is one mod, dang
Here are the moderator last comments so you can have idea of the work he is doing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
Whether something belongs on Hacker News doesn't really depend on the news item so much as on what kind of discussion comes off of it. Some of the most insignificant stories are great Hacker News topics because they spawn amazing discussions.
This thread on the other hand? There's one comment near the top that mentioned some interesting facts about the U.S. Digital Service, and a second comment that's third from the top that tries with limited success to get people to talk about the hack.
The rest of this thread is just mindless snark. That's fair, DOGE is stupid and deserves snark, but it's a waste of space on the HN front page.
A decent metric for whether something belongs on HN is: is the conversation more interesting than the Reddit equivalent would be? The answer here is pretty clearly an emphatic "no", so I think that this belongs on Reddit instead.
There is no conversation here. There's one thread near the top that tries to talk about the actual vulnerability, the rest is knee-jerk snark.
I totally understand why people are knee-jerking, but it's not a conversation and it doesn't belong on HN. We have other forums for knee-jerk snark. I'll be happy to see another DOGE post here the next time there's a topic that has enough meat for a useful conversation to come out of it.
In the meantime, I suspect that dang just left this here to avoid the appearance of silencing the topic. I hope that people who see this come away better understanding why so many of these threads get flagged to death.
It’s not mods. Dang and his team are phenomenally fair. It’s users flagging it because we’re massively tired of this content and if I want to read it and hear endless thoughtless comments, I’ll go to Reddit.
I also believe there are a bunch of Musk fanboys on this site that would flag this. Or people who don’t want to understand the implications of what’s going on and avoid anything that’s “political”.
It's not bots flagging these things, it's regular users. Unless the regular users are bots, which seems unlikely.
When there's a major ongoing topic like this one, especially when it's divisive, the flags tend to come from a combination of (1) users who flag one-sidedly for what appear to be political reasons, and (2) users who don't think the story is on-topic for HN, whether because it's too sensational / flame-prone, too repetitive, or both. The first is a bad reason to flag and the second is a good reason. When we notice users flagging repeatedly for bad reasons, we take their flagging privileges away.
> Unless the regular users are bots, which seems unlikely
Why do you believe it’s unlikely? Are these regular users whose activity predates GPT3? Personally, since LLMs became commercially available I’ve just assumed that at least 50% of comments on the internet are bots.
I didn't know you take the flagging away. That's not a bad idea.
I've been seeing you defend yourself all over the place these days. Sorry to make you feel like you had to do that here too.
My comment was more one of confusion, to clarify. Reading your comments these last few weeks, I trust in your decisions and those of the rest of the mods. HN is a really good place because of you all.
But I also know Elon is super petty/crazy and doing some monkey business is not above him. And yes, I know that sounds very conspiracy theory of me based on your comment here.
Suffice to say, maybe I'm just reacting to the sea change in HN participation and doing some 'self protection'. I like HN and then I recognize this flagging behavior on mostly just two men. Is there more flagging? Yes, but that's 'background' to me. These things don't square to my mind, so I go off to conspiracy land. Either way, my lizard brain is triggered and whether I like it or not, I can't help feeling 'bad/danger'. Maybe some self-work is needed.
Still, thanks a ton for all the time and the effort yo and the rest of the mod team put in here. I really appreciate it.
I also trust dang, but the “Elon has built cool companies so I’m going to set aside what critical thinking skills I have and put my trust in him and Trump and forget that Trump Is an inveterate liar and Elon has been saying shit for a long time now” is really getting to me. I expect that from Reddit or Fox News watchers. I expect higher order thinking from HN and it’s pretty disappointing.
There are at least 60 recent DOGE stories on HN with comments on. I guess people get a bit DOGEd out.
It's probably part of the Trump/Musk strategy. 'Flood the zone' with so many things people can't follow it.
