This decision has more to do with the Court owning its own past mistake, where they deferred to executive agencies. But both the judiciary and the legislative enabled the executive to consolidate lawmaking and interpretive power, thus violating the separation (and balance) of powers. Overruling Chevron is a step in the direction of restoring the balance of power. The balance may never be perfect, but at least we can see when we're far off course and make a correction.
They do now. Before Chevron was reversed, the stuff that appeared to be judicial oversight was being done by the agencies themselves, not by the judiciary.
> Chevron was based on the idea that if statutory text is ambiguous the people in charge of implementing said statute were best positioned to figure out what it meant
Wouldn't it be odd if the police also acted as the judge in your criminal trial? That's the point here, to separate lawmaking and interpretive power from the enforcers. Consolidation of power is dangerous because it doesn't work.
> in accordance with the Administrative Procedures Act
This ruling made clear that the Chevron doctrine was not in line with the APA,
"Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires."
I think it's more analogous to the overlap between police and prosecutors. Those who are the object of regulatory enforcement can and do bring their objections to courts. Another difference is that agency rulemaking is not made in a vacuum; there's a pretty elaborate rulemaking process which includes (iirc) notices of proposed rulemaking, mandatory public comment periods spanning months, pre-publication of draft rules to allow the possibility of litigation and so on.
> I think it's more analogous to the overlap between police and prosecutors.
Those both fall under the executive branch. Plus, Chevron deference was about the court's actions, not prosecutors'.
> Another difference is that agency rulemaking is not made in a vacuum; there's a pretty elaborate rulemaking process which includes (iirc) notices of proposed rulemaking, mandatory public comment periods spanning months, pre-publication of draft rules to allow the possibility of litigation and so on.
That gives the illusion of a democratic process, but in reality, agency rulemakers are not accountable to the people, whereas Congress is. Keep in mind that the fisheries regulation in question on this case was passed during the Trump administration– so it's not like electing a conservative to head the executive put a stop to excess regulation, which is generally a position that conservatives advocate.
That gives the illusion of a democratic process, but in reality, agency rulemakers are not accountable to the people
I didn't claim it it to be a democratic process, I said it was not an arbitrary or isolated one. The democratic element is in the selection of an executive every 4 years. the rulemaking procedures under the Administrative Procedures Act won't be formally changed by this, but I suspect it'll be lengthenedand more heavily litigated, resulting in less regulatory clarity and slower enforcement.
> The democratic element is in the selection of an executive every 4 years.
That did nothing to help the fishery in this case. The burdens placed upon them came from a lower level bureaucrat, a decision that likely never crossed Trump's desk. That's just one regulation among thousands per year for which there is no accountability.
It's more clear if you use the word vest and divest rather than delegation. Congress cannot divest its own legislative powers, nor can it vest them in another branch.
Congress cannot divest its legislative power, nor can it vest interpretive power to executive-branch agencies. The judiciary interprets law— not Congress.
There's no issue with Congress interpreting laws here. The executive branch is (was). Which they have to do because how do you enforce a law that you do not have an interpretation of? If Congress disagrees with the judiciary's interpretation they can just pass a law that makes their interpretation the literal law.
I'd argue their success comes from making people think they're in an open discussion forum, or at least know when they're moderated, when in fact users get moderated left and right without their knowledge.
And rather than addressing that problem, with this IPO they've heaped on another one.
Interesting, it has a del.icio.us scraper. I still don't understand why that site disappeared, it was great. By my recollection, Yahoo bought it and killed it.
I wish someone brought back a Delicious clone. I loved its naive Web 2.0 aesthetics.
I think it was a really nice service. Right now all similar ones I know of are unpleasant to use and get in your way.
It was really minimal and useful to find new things. One particular area where link sharing makes a lot of sense, yet existing services are not very nice, is academic papers.
I don’t really remember delicious, but what would the difference be from something like https://pinboard.in/popular/ ? I was under the impression that’s basically a clone. Was it just a different aesthetic?
Pinboard was a clone with a different business model: users actually paid for it.
Fast forward, and delicious died, only to be acquired by — you guessed it — Pinboard [1]. Because Pinboard was actually serving its paying customers, it just kept trucking along.
That's exactly what happened and made me hate Yahoo even more than I already had. The day delicious was shut down for good I lost something that I have never managed to replace. Sad times :(
Tons of mod tools built on top of shadow comment removals: crowd control, comment nuke, disruptive comment collapsing, contributor quality score, subreddit shadow bans via automoderator ...
Check your account here [1], you probably have removed comments you don't know about. Or comment here [2] to see how it works.
Additionally, just because it’s possible that this could happen doesn’t really give us an idea of how likely it is. Is it one of those theoretically possible, but it never actually happens events? there’s a huge difference between it impacting half of the stories that fall off that quickly, and it impacting 1 in 10,000 stories that fall off that quickly.
Communities would get a good sense for the frequency if forums would simply disclose content moderation to the submitting users. Offending users would learn what's not allowed and share that with the community.
But today's forums frequently do not disclose moderation to submitting users, and that is why we are now seeing major court cases over 230, government-led censorship, etc.
I don't know anything about other forums, but for the reasons why on HN we don't publish a full moderation log, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 as well as the past explanations linked from there.
You can, however, always get a question answered. That's basically our implicit contract with the community.
Full moderation logs are different than showing submitters how their posts have been moderated.
On HN, my understanding is that you (moderators) can penalize stories without the submitter's knowledge. But if HN instead disclosed that penalty to the story's submitter, that would help this community communicate better.
As for how it works elsewhere, if a YouTube channel removes your comment, you won't know [1]. Same thing on Reddit, Facebook, and X. So while HN is relatively small, the practice of withholding content moderation decisions from submitters/commenters is widespread.
I'm sorry, but I think that would have the effect of making what is already a difficult job impossible. Even if most submitters saw that information and went "oh! well I guess that's that then," the number who would instantly fire off emails of protest would overwhelm our capacity to answer them.
Every submitter thinks their story deserves to make HN's front page, if not #1. Actually, that's not entirely true—the cleverest and most tasteful submitters are often the most humble. We have to go out of our way to try to find what they post because they're the last people who would ever send an email demanding attention.
But I can tell you from experience (81,556 emails and counting) that there are far more people who think their blog post ought to be #1 on HN than I could ever answer, and I can tell you what happens if one tries: many come back with a list of objections that is 3x longer than the entire conversation so far. The problem grows the more you feed it.
I want people to be able to get answers to their questions. No one would love it more than me if we could find some automated way of reducing that load while still answering people's questions. But so far every suggestion of how to do this sets off so many alarms in my body that I wonder if I'll sleep that night.
I'm afraid that might come across dismissive and I apologize if it does. It's just that the status quo already involves so much pressure that if I try to explain, I come across as a deranged beach ball that's been pinned deep underwater for 10 years.
Thank you for the question. I can think of two reasons:
(1) You wouldn't want someone to secretly remove or demote your own commentary. But secretive content moderation is extremely common on today's major platforms. In order to be heard there, you would need to fight back against the practice, and you cannot effectively do that while keeping secrets yourself.
(2) Undisclosed content moderation does not express any kind of message, and therefore the platforms' use of it may not even be protected by the first amendment.
#2 is currently under discussion in a few cases before the Supreme Court:
How is it a free speech issue when someone kicks you off their property? It has nothing to do with speech so why would the first amendment be involved?
And to add to that, USA's 1st Amendment applies only to actions by the government. But this does mean that in other situations that redress is never available. It just may require more nuance or collective action, or conversely, even the willingness to let something go.
(I am not commenting in this message on whether an HN issue may exist or should be let go. On those matters, I am still reading.)
In the case of shadow banning, you haven't kicked them off your property. You're asking them to stay while you earn ad money from their attention.
See the linked tweet for a more lawyerly argument in defense of shadow banning. The question before the court may hinge upon whether or not shadow banning expresses a message.
Wtf are you talking about? He’s literally telling us and has mentioned in the community many times that flagging quickly crushes a story.
I’ve seen it happen when I’ve flagged stories so either there is a vast conspiracy of moderators that receive pages when I flag things so they can downrank… or maybe dang isn’t lying about something that should be super obvious as a community self policing mechanism.
I appreciate the accuracy in your comment but do please edit out swipes like "Wtf are you talking about"—those spread bad feeling, and when we're talking about the community itself it's even more important not to do that.
> Wtf are you talking about? He’s literally telling us and has mentioned in the community many times that flagging quickly crushes a story.
It's discussed in the link, and elsewhere [1]. Some mod actions on HN are transparent, some are not. You should not assume that, just because you see marks of some form of moderation, that you can see them all.
Undisclosed content moderation is like directly modifying your production database. It's faster, but always more troublesome. Nobody else knows what changed or why, etc.
If you want a site with a public mod log, there's Lobsters. If you want a site with a mod log that's cryptographically auditable by users, I'm sure blockchainia has something on offer. You're not going to get either of those things here, for reasons the community has dug into in the past and you can surface with the search bar.
Sure, that could happen. And if it does, it will happen by way of people leaving sites like this one for sites moderated differently. I think we're all OK with letting the market decide.
