> EU waking hours have comments that seem disconnected from genAI. And, while the US hours show a lot of resistance, it's more fear than a feeling that the tools are worthless.
I don't think it's because the audience is different but because the moderators are asleep when Europeans are up. There are certain topics which don't really survive on the frontpage when moderators are active.
I'm unsure how you're using "moderators." We, the audience, are all 'moderators' if we have the karma. The operators of the site are pretty hands-off as far as content in general.
This would mean it is because the audience is different.
I'm sure this site works quite differently from what you say. There's no paid team of moderators flicking stories and comments off the site because management doesn't like them.
There's dang who I've seen edit headlines to match the site rules. Then there's the army of users upvoting and flagging stories, voting (up and down) and flagging comments. If you have some data to backup your sentiments, please do share it - we'd certainly like to evaluate it.
My email exchanges with Dang, as part of the moderation that happens around here, have all been positive
1. I've been moderated, got a slowdown timeout for a while
2. I've emailed about specific accounts, (some egregious stuff you've probably never seen)
3. Dang once emailed me to ask why I flagged a story that was near the top, but getting heavily flagged by many users. He sought understanding before making moderation choices
I will defend HN moderation people & policies 'til the cows come home. There is nothing close to what we have here on HN, which is largely about us being involved in the process and HN having a unique UX and size
dang announced they were moved from volunteer to paid position a few years ago. More rumblings about more mods brought on since then. What makes you say you're "so sure"?
> There's no paid team of moderators flicking stories and comments off the site because management doesn't like them.
Emphasis mine. The question is does the paid moderation team disappear unfavorable posts and comments, or are they merely downranked and marked dead (which can still be seen by turning on showdead in your profile).
The by far more common action is for the mods to restore a story which has been flagged to oblivion by a subset of the HN community, where it then lands on the front page because it already has sufficient pointage
It's not controversial to say that submissions are being moderated, that's how this (and many other) sites work. I haven't made any claims about how often it happens, or how it relates to second-chance moderation.
What I'm pointing out is just that moderation isn't the same at different times of the day and that this sometimes can explain what content you see during EU and US waking hours. If you're active during EU daytime hours and US morning hours, you can see the pattern yourself. Tools like hnrankings [1] make it easy to watch how many top-10 stories fall off the front page at different times of day over a few days.
> I’m referring to the actual moderators of this website removing posts from the front page.
This is what you said. There has only been one until this year, so now we have two.
The moderation patterns you see are the community and certainly have significant time factors that play into that. The idea that someone is going into the system and making manual changes to remove content is the conspiracy theory
Anything sovereign AI or whatever is gone immediately when the mods wake up.
Got an EU cloud article? Publish it at 11am CET, it's disappears around 12.30.
I don't think it's because the audience is different but because the moderators are asleep when Europeans are up. There are certain topics which don't really survive on the frontpage when moderators are active.