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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

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.

wyager 9y ago
> I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. The Reddit mods and admins are notoriously censorious. If you want minimal moderation, you would need to go to the anonymous imageboards. The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many.
- TACIXAT 9y ago
  Agree so much. Any voting system is going to create bubbles. Head over to 4chan and you will get to interact with all sorts of different opinions.
  - ivm 9y ago
    Imageboards have a clickbait-based bubble. To survive on a busy board, you need to create a post that captures attention. Hence, the effect of 4chan on the Internet — its top posters are the edge of the troll evolution.
- maccard 9y ago
  > The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many. Could you provide some examples of how the content is better there? I'd be interested, but any time I've ever tried to investigate, I can't get past all the unfettered crap
  - deadmetheny 9y ago
    At least on 4chan, the content is all time-limited, so finding persistent examples isn't really doable. However, the more niche boards are full of quality content for their particular niches, and depending on the culture of the particular board people can be very helpful. I personally appreciate 4chan for generally weighing the value of a particular post on its own merits rather than any sort of user history or whatever - it's a good counter-balance to places like HN or Reddit where comments can get buried or removed if they go against the hive mind and there's no post history to dig through. I definitely get how the trade-off of inflammatory posts being more common isn't as palatable to some people, though, so it's kind of a mixed bag on if you'll get anything out of it or not. Opinions, etc.
    - snerbles 9y ago
      The inflammatory nature of the chans is in and of itself a filter - people that partake in imageboard discussions tend to be more thick-skinned as a result.
wizbright 9y ago
Really, the users police themselves for the most part. People aren't as obnoxious as many Reddit users tend to be. That being said, the front page changes a good amount during the day so nothing really sits at the top for awhile unless it is a really popular post. The last one Drew submitted dropped down pretty quick if I remember correctly.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  > Really, the users police themselves for the most part. This is a very double edged sword, especially when advice is being given. Being able to anonymously down-vote BS rather than explaining one's objection creates a positive feedback loop. Someone will ask about something, subjects that are not mainstream enough for many people to know but are still common enough for many people to have exposure to are particularly dangerous. Reddit's design amplifies even the slightest majority opinion to where it looks like a near unanimously held opinion. If the first ten people on the scene are laymen who just up-vote whatever the relevant old wives tail or urban legend is then an actual SME who comes along saying "but you're wrong, it doesn't actually work like that" they often get down-voted to oblivion. People tend to Google it when they see conflicting opinions so what the first page of Google says is highly relevant. Now, for a semi-mainstream topic information on the general case is far more accessible than the specific case. The result is a lot of advice that is terrible for the specific situation but good in general gets tossed around like it's gospel. Reddit doesn't self police. The appearance of consensus where there isn't one creates the illusion of everyone stepping in line because any non-majority (majority local to the sub) opinion is negative-weighted. Edit: realized you were talking about HN users, my comment about Reddit still stands.
  - wizbright 9y ago
    Reddit is a whole different story. Especially with the brigading that happens quite often in some sub-reddits but yes, HN users tend to be better at self moderation and the mod team has also done a pretty good job at running the site. Transparency will only benefit the users and allows us to see why some decisions were made and how we can fix them moving forward if we need to.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
As the author of this article, I agree with you. I applaud the HN moderation for their work, and I think the result is a really great place for news and discussion. I'm just calling for greater transparency - and pointing out that the users are abusing the flagging feature.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
andrewguenther 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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"?
    - wvenable 9y ago
      For the most part, the topic gathers posts from both sides regardless of the content of the linked article. So simply flagging the entire topic away is fair.
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      The issue isn't really the one-sided-ness of the comments, or the volume of the comments. The issue is the quality of the comments. Even on a hot-button topic, there are quality comments made, by both sides. Those are worth reading, no matter which side you take on the issue. And then there are the "You're so stupid, how could you think something so idiotic, I hope you die in a fire" comments. Those comments don't add much except noise. If you want the quality comments to be visible among the noise, you need to weed out the noise comments. You need this more on hot-button topics, because they attract more noise comments.
abandonliberty 9y ago
Luckily the community largely self-moderates and comments are generally very high value. At the moment we don't appear to have a significant troll problem. Reddit was like this almost 10 years ago. This is the bliss of obscurity. We should hold a wake for Reddit 2010. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit,hckrnews,ycombinator,news.ycombinator.com https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit,h... (though I doubt people coming to this site actually google it) Supposedly if you find the right subreddits it gets better, but since I have HN I haven't bothered. Nothing lasts forever - I wonder how long before HN goes the way of slashdot and reddit.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
  I was under the impression this site grew by word of mouth and that advertising it to any and everyone was a bit antithetical to then purpose of the site.
- tomkat0789 9y ago
  The problem with obscurity is I don't know where to find another HN when it goes the way of Slashdot! How do people find small unique sites like this?
  - metiscus 9y ago
    Some people mentioned this place in a few threads during the whole Slashdot 2.0 thing and that lead me here. I presume if this place ever does go south similar things will happen. Let's work to keep this place what it is and make it better.
  - abandonliberty 9y ago
    I have the same concern. I assume right now there must be other similarly awesome communities that I just don't know about.
gras 9y ago
I've personally found HN to be a lot more censorious than the subreddits I frequent. I really don't like the diverse fuckery the HN board software uses as "anti-spam" measures, like account creation IP bans ("Account creation temporarily disabled"), slowbans, hellbans and defacto bans that discard the content of your post and pretend to be temporary ("Too fast").
- DanBC 9y ago
  You might want to look at your comment history in an incognito browser window. Are you posting via proxies?
stcredzero 9y ago
I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. Some of the most heavy-handed moderation I've seen lately has been on some subreddits.
yahna 9y ago
I too prefer my echo chambers to be free of wrong-think. None of that controversy in my safe space either.
DanBC 9y ago
> so I don't really know how nice (or not nice) is HN from the submitters' point of view. I submit a lot (although not nearly as much as some others) and I have no idea of what submission will be good or not. Some things I think are good don't take off, and get put in the second chance queue. Other things I think are good don't get put in that queue, and I don't know why.
- dang 9y ago
  If you think something is particularly good you can always email us. We probably didn't see it.

wyager 9y ago

> I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. The Reddit mods and admins are notoriously censorious. If you want minimal moderation, you would need to go to the anonymous imageboards. The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many.

TACIXAT 9y ago
Agree so much. Any voting system is going to create bubbles. Head over to 4chan and you will get to interact with all sorts of different opinions.
- ivm 9y ago
  Imageboards have a clickbait-based bubble. To survive on a busy board, you need to create a post that captures attention. Hence, the effect of 4chan on the Internet — its top posters are the edge of the troll evolution.
maccard 9y ago
> The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many. Could you provide some examples of how the content is better there? I'd be interested, but any time I've ever tried to investigate, I can't get past all the unfettered crap
- deadmetheny 9y ago
  At least on 4chan, the content is all time-limited, so finding persistent examples isn't really doable. However, the more niche boards are full of quality content for their particular niches, and depending on the culture of the particular board people can be very helpful. I personally appreciate 4chan for generally weighing the value of a particular post on its own merits rather than any sort of user history or whatever - it's a good counter-balance to places like HN or Reddit where comments can get buried or removed if they go against the hive mind and there's no post history to dig through. I definitely get how the trade-off of inflammatory posts being more common isn't as palatable to some people, though, so it's kind of a mixed bag on if you'll get anything out of it or not. Opinions, etc.
  - snerbles 9y ago
    The inflammatory nature of the chans is in and of itself a filter - people that partake in imageboard discussions tend to be more thick-skinned as a result.

wizbright 9y ago

Really, the users police themselves for the most part. People aren't as obnoxious as many Reddit users tend to be. That being said, the front page changes a good amount during the day so nothing really sits at the top for awhile unless it is a really popular post. The last one Drew submitted dropped down pretty quick if I remember correctly.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
> Really, the users police themselves for the most part. This is a very double edged sword, especially when advice is being given. Being able to anonymously down-vote BS rather than explaining one's objection creates a positive feedback loop. Someone will ask about something, subjects that are not mainstream enough for many people to know but are still common enough for many people to have exposure to are particularly dangerous. Reddit's design amplifies even the slightest majority opinion to where it looks like a near unanimously held opinion. If the first ten people on the scene are laymen who just up-vote whatever the relevant old wives tail or urban legend is then an actual SME who comes along saying "but you're wrong, it doesn't actually work like that" they often get down-voted to oblivion. People tend to Google it when they see conflicting opinions so what the first page of Google says is highly relevant. Now, for a semi-mainstream topic information on the general case is far more accessible than the specific case. The result is a lot of advice that is terrible for the specific situation but good in general gets tossed around like it's gospel. Reddit doesn't self police. The appearance of consensus where there isn't one creates the illusion of everyone stepping in line because any non-majority (majority local to the sub) opinion is negative-weighted. Edit: realized you were talking about HN users, my comment about Reddit still stands.
- wizbright 9y ago
  Reddit is a whole different story. Especially with the brigading that happens quite often in some sub-reddits but yes, HN users tend to be better at self moderation and the mod team has also done a pretty good job at running the site. Transparency will only benefit the users and allows us to see why some decisions were made and how we can fix them moving forward if we need to.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

As the author of this article, I agree with you. I applaud the HN moderation for their work, and I think the result is a really great place for news and discussion. I'm just calling for greater transparency - and pointing out that the users are abusing the flagging feature.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

andrewguenther 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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"?
  - wvenable 9y ago
    For the most part, the topic gathers posts from both sides regardless of the content of the linked article. So simply flagging the entire topic away is fair.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    The issue isn't really the one-sided-ness of the comments, or the volume of the comments. The issue is the quality of the comments. Even on a hot-button topic, there are quality comments made, by both sides. Those are worth reading, no matter which side you take on the issue. And then there are the "You're so stupid, how could you think something so idiotic, I hope you die in a fire" comments. Those comments don't add much except noise. If you want the quality comments to be visible among the noise, you need to weed out the noise comments. You need this more on hot-button topics, because they attract more noise comments.

abandonliberty 9y ago

Luckily the community largely self-moderates and comments are generally very high value. At the moment we don't appear to have a significant troll problem. Reddit was like this almost 10 years ago. This is the bliss of obscurity. We should hold a wake for Reddit 2010. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit,hckrnews,ycombinator,news.ycombinator.com https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit,h... (though I doubt people coming to this site actually google it) Supposedly if you find the right subreddits it gets better, but since I have HN I haven't bothered. Nothing lasts forever - I wonder how long before HN goes the way of slashdot and reddit.

SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
I was under the impression this site grew by word of mouth and that advertising it to any and everyone was a bit antithetical to then purpose of the site.
tomkat0789 9y ago
The problem with obscurity is I don't know where to find another HN when it goes the way of Slashdot! How do people find small unique sites like this?
- metiscus 9y ago
  Some people mentioned this place in a few threads during the whole Slashdot 2.0 thing and that lead me here. I presume if this place ever does go south similar things will happen. Let's work to keep this place what it is and make it better.
- abandonliberty 9y ago
  I have the same concern. I assume right now there must be other similarly awesome communities that I just don't know about.

gras 9y ago

I've personally found HN to be a lot more censorious than the subreddits I frequent. I really don't like the diverse fuckery the HN board software uses as "anti-spam" measures, like account creation IP bans ("Account creation temporarily disabled"), slowbans, hellbans and defacto bans that discard the content of your post and pretend to be temporary ("Too fast").

DanBC 9y ago
You might want to look at your comment history in an incognito browser window. Are you posting via proxies?

stcredzero 9y ago

I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. Some of the most heavy-handed moderation I've seen lately has been on some subreddits.

yahna 9y ago

I too prefer my echo chambers to be free of wrong-think. None of that controversy in my safe space either.

DanBC 9y ago

> so I don't really know how nice (or not nice) is HN from the submitters' point of view. I submit a lot (although not nearly as much as some others) and I have no idea of what submission will be good or not. Some things I think are good don't take off, and get put in the second chance queue. Other things I think are good don't get put in that queue, and I don't know why.

dang 9y ago
If you think something is particularly good you can always email us. We probably didn't see it.