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Sorry for the ramble. The response is appreciated regardless. (Feel no compulsion to reply by the way, I just wanted to try and be more clear, I'm already grat

Sorry for the ramble. The response is appreciated regardless. (Feel no compulsion to reply by the way, I just wanted to try and be more clear, I'm already grateful you took some time to try and answer.) To distill it: I don't share the perception that enforcement is consistent. Social/sexual topics REGULARLY frontpage with minimal scores, while economic/political topics regularly languish despite having both closer ties to our industry and relating to much more impactful individuals. To answer your own question "what sort of site HN is trying to be," I'd echo a statement the mods have made in the past, that it likely precludes topics that things like ET and chose your favorite tabloid has already covered to death by the time it shows up here, and primarily end up encouraging polarizing arguments without productive ends.

dang 9y ago
I'm not sure it's true that social/sexual topics get more moderation support than economics topics. Both overlap with politics and both have intellectually interesting areas. From my point of view we moderate them much the same. Purely political stories are different. One of the most consistent phenomena I've observed here is that people's images of bias invariably reflect their own preferences. Users place a much higher weight on things they don't like than on things they do like. So to the extent that you prefer A stories to B stories, you're likely to feel there are way too many of B relative to A. You're welcome to let us know (hn@ycombinator.com) if you see a particularly interesting economics story that deserves a chance at attention. We can take a look and maybe put it in the second-chance queue, described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and links back from there. What we look for in such an article is how much of a diff there is from other stories of the genre. If it's more substantive than usual, that's good; if it seems predictable or likely to lead to predictable discussions, that's bad. Same standard as we applied to this one.

dang 9y ago

I'm not sure it's true that social/sexual topics get more moderation support than economics topics. Both overlap with politics and both have intellectually interesting areas. From my point of view we moderate them much the same. Purely political stories are different. One of the most consistent phenomena I've observed here is that people's images of bias invariably reflect their own preferences. Users place a much higher weight on things they don't like than on things they do like. So to the extent that you prefer A stories to B stories, you're likely to feel there are way too many of B relative to A. You're welcome to let us know (hn@ycombinator.com) if you see a particularly interesting economics story that deserves a chance at attention. We can take a look and maybe put it in the second-chance queue, described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and links back from there. What we look for in such an article is how much of a diff there is from other stories of the genre. If it's more substantive than usual, that's good; if it seems predictable or likely to lead to predictable discussions, that's bad. Same standard as we applied to this one.