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> those comments don't get flagged out of future HN search results. Triplebyte is a YC company and HN is a YC site, so economic interests are aligned with nuki

> those comments don't get flagged out of future HN search results. Triplebyte is a YC company and HN is a YC site, so economic interests are aligned with nuking highly critical comments

wolfgang42 6y ago
Regarding HN’s policy on discussions of YC companies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280121 What 'nabilhat is talking about is the way the Triplebyte CEO’s comments in this thread (which are the opposite of “highly critical”) are being downvoted to very light grey.
troydavis 6y ago
> economic interests are aligned with nuking highly critical comments This is theoretically true, but the fact that it's been on the home page for 12 hours and has accumulated hundreds of critical comments, none of which any mod has touched, seems to (a) eliminate that possibility and (b) demonstrate that the risk is theoretical, not actual. (Keep in mind that YC has thousands of investments, so whatever you think of their ethics or the incentives, a filter like this would be impractical and obvious. Also see "Not behaving in a way that damages the reputation of his/her company" on https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/ https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/ - it's hard to imagine YC supporting this.)
- wolfgang42 6y ago
  In fact the only (public) mod action was to put it back on the homepage after it tripped the flamewar detector and fell off.
  - ganstyles 6y ago
    This thread rose to the top group of the front page last night (you can see I posted here then, I happened to see it). Then it sunk quickly and disappeared. I was a little dismayed because the cynic in me was thinking along the lines of it being removed for being antithetical to YC company success. I went to bed. To my surprise, it was back up near the top this morning with almost a thousand votes and hundreds of comments. TripleByte may have chosen to burn their reputation irreparably, but I have gained a lot of faith in YC and the mods here.
    - dang 6y ago
      It fell because of a software penalty called the flamewar detector. We review posts that get that penalty because there are often false positives. I saw it on the list last night and restored it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280488). That was the only action any moderator took on the post. I'm glad I saw it quickly enough, because there would have been a nightmare of a flamewar about us 'suppressing' the post if we had missed this, when in reality it would just have been an accident of timing. That raises the obvious question of why we have such software if it causes such problems, but the answer is simply that it helps more than it hurts, overall.
      - ganstyles 6y ago
        Yeah, thanks for the response. I saw you mention this downthread after you made the comment. Thanks for the work you do moderating this place.
      - alexpetralia 6y ago
        Hi dang, sent you an email about this, but perhaps it would be useful to include a page on HN recording "recent moderator actions". This could make the process more transparent for users and help them understand your actions (rather than producing conspiracy theories every week).
        dang 6y ago
        The question is whether that would raise more objections and protests than it would answer. Almost everything we do is defensible to the community, because if it weren't, we wouldn't do it in the first place. I say 'almost' because we make wrong guesses, but then we're happy to admit mistakes and fix them. That doesn't mean it's all self-explanatory, though. On the contrary, it can take a long time to explain because there are many complexities, tradeoffs, and non-obvious aspects. Meta threads and discussions tend to invite objections from the litigious type of user. Such users are rarely satisfied, but have a ton of energy for meta argument, so it's easy to get into a situation where any answer you give leads to two or three fresh objections. Such objections have to be answered with great care, because if you slip up and say the wrong thing, people will use it to drum up a scandal (edit: and will quote it against you for years to come!). This consumes a lot of mental and emotional energy. (Edit: btw, this is asymmetrical: the people raising objections and making accusations are under no such restriction. They can say anything without downside, no matter how false it is or what they accuse you of. They can make things up with impunity and people will believe them by default, because on the internet you are guilty until proven innocent, plus everyone loves the underdog. These are additional reasons why it's easy to end up in a situation where every comment you spend an hour painstakingly composing earns you a bunch more counterarguments and demands.) These arguments tend to be repetitive, so you find yourself having to say the same things and defend against the same attacks and false accusations over and over. This is discouraging, and there's a high risk of burnout. Disgruntled users are a tiny minority, but there are more than enough of them to overwhelm our limited resources. I fear this outcome, so we've always shied away from adding such a system. We do want to be transparent, and we answer whatever questions people ask, but it feels safer to do it ad hoc as questions come up. There's no specific question you can't get an answer to, other than a few special cases like how HN's anti-abuse software works. There's an opportunity cost issue too. The vast majority of the community is pretty happy with how we do things—I know that because if they weren't, we'd never hear the end of it, and then we'd say sorry and readjust until they were. I think it makes more sense to do things to keep the bulk of the community happy, or make them happier, than to pour potentially all our resources into placating a small minority—especially since, once you've done this job for a while (say, a week) you know that nothing you do will ever be completely right or please everyone. On the other hand, if I could ever be persuaded that a full moderation log would satisfy everyone's curiosity and reduce the overhead of misinterpretation, complaints, imagined malfeasance, etc., then we'd be happy to do it. This question has come up repeatedly, so if you're curious to read previous answers, see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20meta%20litig&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
- SilasX 6y ago
  This. I mean, I'm all for being aware of others' biases and conflicts of interest, but -- whatever else you might criticize the mod team for -- they're definitely not "running interference" for TB or anything here.
thsowers 6y ago
When it comes to moderation of a YC startup on HN, "The first rule of HN moderation is to moderate less, not more" says dang on previous threads concerning YC startups and he has expressed the same sentiment here in this thread
crankylinuxuser 6y ago
Wouldn't be the first time HN/automoderation/mods have removed 'critical to YC business interests'. Happened to me with the Thalmic Myo, when I open source forced them to open their platform. HackADay also notes that HN autohid my article. https://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free-developer-access/ https://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free... HaD wasn't hidden.. Thalmic was. Dang has usually responded with noncommital responses like they never do that. But further requests for being transparent has fallen on deaf ears. edit: and -1'ed. Is this because "my content sucks"? Is it because of 'offtopic'? Or is it a mod? Considering karma here determines rights, rate limiting, mod-down, flagging, and more - these points do matter here. And of course the larger issue here is lack of transparency. In fact, with removal of mod scores, the site has gone down in transparency.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 6y ago
  I feel like if someone is still upset about a case like this 6 years later, we should probably try to figure out why and see what we can do to settle the matter. But HN has had 15M posts since then and I have zero memory of it. Actually I probably have zero memory of HN from 2 days ago. Can you link to the relevant post(s)? I looked at that hackaday.com page. It says this: "Quick aside, but if you want to see how nearly every form of media is crooked, try submitting this to Hacker News and look at the Thalmic investors. Edit: don’t bother, we’re blacklisted or something."...but is also linkless. Usually when people make dudgeonly claims but conspicuously omit links, it's because what actually happened doesn't match what they say. Re "dang has usually responded with noncommital responses": I try to be commital. There is little to be gained by not, since we try not to do things that aren't defensible to the community in the first place. If you have any tips to offer for increased commitalness, I'd like to hear them. Edit: I just noticed this bit: "further requests for being transparent has fallen on deaf ears". When? That doesn't sound like us.
dang 6y ago
That's a natural assumption, but if you think a step further it's not hard to see why it's false: you shouldn't optimize for local optima, especially if doing that would ruin your global optimum. When you have a goose that lays golden eggs, don't risk the goose for an egg. YC's economic interest in HN is having it be a happy, thriving community. That dominates all other considerations put together. A fast way to ruin that would be to destroy the community's good faith by suppressing negative posts about YC or YC startups. In addition to being wrong (we wouldn't want to belong to such a community ourselves), it would be dumb. If anyone wants more explanation there are posts about HN vis-à-vis YC's business interests going back years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20yc%20business%20interests&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20curiosity%20optimiz&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., which describes the simple way we try to optimize this (simple in principle, though not in execution). And see https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements/ from 2015 about HN's editorial independence. (Edit—because I've been wanting to write about this for some time and this may as well be the place:) The above is the answer I always give to questions of how HN serves YC's business, because it's true and it's solid economics. It's the right answer to give to anyone who's looking at the question through a cynical economic lens (as we all have been trained to do) since it basically says "we can be even more cynically self-interested by not doing that". However, I also always feel a little bad after giving that answer because it's not the deeper truth. The deeper truth is that we just feel this way. HN and YC grew up together. In a way they are siblings, and one doesn't exploit one's sibling. Or, to switch metaphors: because HN and YC grew together, the connections between them are complex and organic, like the connections between brain hemispheres. If you get in there and start snipping and moving things around, you'll probably lobotomize yourself. If you want a hard-nosed business reason for how HN makes money for YC, one is: it leads to people starting startups that wouldn't otherwise exist, and it leads to YC funding startups that it wouldn't otherwise get to fund. That's how HN adds to YC's core business (edit: but see [1] below). I use that reasoning to explain to people why we don't need to sell ads on HN or do other things to monetize it or drive growth. Again, though, it doesn't capture how I (and I think most at YC) really think and feel about HN. The deeper truth is the two have always been together and we can't imagine them otherwise. In other words, the value of HN to YC is intangible. That affects how we operate HN. If the value were tangible, then snipping things and moving them around and generally being bustling and managerial would be the way to go, or at least the most likely thing that people inside a business would do. But since it's intangible, all that kind of thing gets supplanted by a general feeling of "this is good, don't fuck it up". Since the main indicator of whether we're fucking it up or not is the community, the way HN can most add value to YC is by keeping the community happy. Happiness means interest (HN is supposed to be interesting) and trust (a community can't exist without trust). This is not a paradise that will last forever—it's a historical accident that an internet forum ended up in a sweet spot vis-à-vis the company that owns it, where the business is better off optimizing for the forum being good and happy than by banner ads or growth hacking. But we all know that it's an honor to get to be stewards of a community in that way, and while nothing lasts forever, we want to keep it going as long as possible, and maybe longer than one could reasonably have thought possible. [1] edit: for some reason I forgot to mention the three formal things that HN also gives to YC: job ads for YC startups, Launch HNs for YC startups, and displaying YC founder usernames in orange to other YC founders. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23293437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23293437 for more.

> those comments don't get flagged out of future HN search results. Triplebyte is a YC company and HN is a YC site, so economic interests are aligned with nuking highly critical comments

wolfgang42 6y ago

Regarding HN’s policy on discussions of YC companies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280121 What 'nabilhat is talking about is the way the Triplebyte CEO’s comments in this thread (which are the opposite of “highly critical”) are being downvoted to very light grey.

troydavis 6y ago

> economic interests are aligned with nuking highly critical comments This is theoretically true, but the fact that it's been on the home page for 12 hours and has accumulated hundreds of critical comments, none of which any mod has touched, seems to (a) eliminate that possibility and (b) demonstrate that the risk is theoretical, not actual. (Keep in mind that YC has thousands of investments, so whatever you think of their ethics or the incentives, a filter like this would be impractical and obvious. Also see "Not behaving in a way that damages the reputation of his/her company" on https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/ https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/ - it's hard to imagine YC supporting this.)

wolfgang42 6y ago
In fact the only (public) mod action was to put it back on the homepage after it tripped the flamewar detector and fell off.
- ganstyles 6y ago
  This thread rose to the top group of the front page last night (you can see I posted here then, I happened to see it). Then it sunk quickly and disappeared. I was a little dismayed because the cynic in me was thinking along the lines of it being removed for being antithetical to YC company success. I went to bed. To my surprise, it was back up near the top this morning with almost a thousand votes and hundreds of comments. TripleByte may have chosen to burn their reputation irreparably, but I have gained a lot of faith in YC and the mods here.
  - dang 6y ago
    It fell because of a software penalty called the flamewar detector. We review posts that get that penalty because there are often false positives. I saw it on the list last night and restored it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280488). That was the only action any moderator took on the post. I'm glad I saw it quickly enough, because there would have been a nightmare of a flamewar about us 'suppressing' the post if we had missed this, when in reality it would just have been an accident of timing. That raises the obvious question of why we have such software if it causes such problems, but the answer is simply that it helps more than it hurts, overall.
    - ganstyles 6y ago
      Yeah, thanks for the response. I saw you mention this downthread after you made the comment. Thanks for the work you do moderating this place.
    - alexpetralia 6y ago
      Hi dang, sent you an email about this, but perhaps it would be useful to include a page on HN recording "recent moderator actions". This could make the process more transparent for users and help them understand your actions (rather than producing conspiracy theories every week).
      - dang 6y ago
        The question is whether that would raise more objections and protests than it would answer. Almost everything we do is defensible to the community, because if it weren't, we wouldn't do it in the first place. I say 'almost' because we make wrong guesses, but then we're happy to admit mistakes and fix them. That doesn't mean it's all self-explanatory, though. On the contrary, it can take a long time to explain because there are many complexities, tradeoffs, and non-obvious aspects. Meta threads and discussions tend to invite objections from the litigious type of user. Such users are rarely satisfied, but have a ton of energy for meta argument, so it's easy to get into a situation where any answer you give leads to two or three fresh objections. Such objections have to be answered with great care, because if you slip up and say the wrong thing, people will use it to drum up a scandal (edit: and will quote it against you for years to come!). This consumes a lot of mental and emotional energy. (Edit: btw, this is asymmetrical: the people raising objections and making accusations are under no such restriction. They can say anything without downside, no matter how false it is or what they accuse you of. They can make things up with impunity and people will believe them by default, because on the internet you are guilty until proven innocent, plus everyone loves the underdog. These are additional reasons why it's easy to end up in a situation where every comment you spend an hour painstakingly composing earns you a bunch more counterarguments and demands.) These arguments tend to be repetitive, so you find yourself having to say the same things and defend against the same attacks and false accusations over and over. This is discouraging, and there's a high risk of burnout. Disgruntled users are a tiny minority, but there are more than enough of them to overwhelm our limited resources. I fear this outcome, so we've always shied away from adding such a system. We do want to be transparent, and we answer whatever questions people ask, but it feels safer to do it ad hoc as questions come up. There's no specific question you can't get an answer to, other than a few special cases like how HN's anti-abuse software works. There's an opportunity cost issue too. The vast majority of the community is pretty happy with how we do things—I know that because if they weren't, we'd never hear the end of it, and then we'd say sorry and readjust until they were. I think it makes more sense to do things to keep the bulk of the community happy, or make them happier, than to pour potentially all our resources into placating a small minority—especially since, once you've done this job for a while (say, a week) you know that nothing you do will ever be completely right or please everyone. On the other hand, if I could ever be persuaded that a full moderation log would satisfy everyone's curiosity and reduce the overhead of misinterpretation, complaints, imagined malfeasance, etc., then we'd be happy to do it. This question has come up repeatedly, so if you're curious to read previous answers, see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20meta%20litig&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
SilasX 6y ago
This. I mean, I'm all for being aware of others' biases and conflicts of interest, but -- whatever else you might criticize the mod team for -- they're definitely not "running interference" for TB or anything here.

thsowers 6y ago

When it comes to moderation of a YC startup on HN, "The first rule of HN moderation is to moderate less, not more" says dang on previous threads concerning YC startups and he has expressed the same sentiment here in this thread

crankylinuxuser 6y ago

Wouldn't be the first time HN/automoderation/mods have removed 'critical to YC business interests'. Happened to me with the Thalmic Myo, when I open source forced them to open their platform. HackADay also notes that HN autohid my article. https://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free-developer-access/ https://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free... HaD wasn't hidden.. Thalmic was. Dang has usually responded with noncommital responses like they never do that. But further requests for being transparent has fallen on deaf ears. edit: and -1'ed. Is this because "my content sucks"? Is it because of 'offtopic'? Or is it a mod? Considering karma here determines rights, rate limiting, mod-down, flagging, and more - these points do matter here. And of course the larger issue here is lack of transparency. In fact, with removal of mod scores, the site has gone down in transparency.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dang 6y ago
I feel like if someone is still upset about a case like this 6 years later, we should probably try to figure out why and see what we can do to settle the matter. But HN has had 15M posts since then and I have zero memory of it. Actually I probably have zero memory of HN from 2 days ago. Can you link to the relevant post(s)? I looked at that hackaday.com page. It says this: "Quick aside, but if you want to see how nearly every form of media is crooked, try submitting this to Hacker News and look at the Thalmic investors. Edit: don’t bother, we’re blacklisted or something."...but is also linkless. Usually when people make dudgeonly claims but conspicuously omit links, it's because what actually happened doesn't match what they say. Re "dang has usually responded with noncommital responses": I try to be commital. There is little to be gained by not, since we try not to do things that aren't defensible to the community in the first place. If you have any tips to offer for increased commitalness, I'd like to hear them. Edit: I just noticed this bit: "further requests for being transparent has fallen on deaf ears". When? That doesn't sound like us.

dang 6y ago

That's a natural assumption, but if you think a step further it's not hard to see why it's false: you shouldn't optimize for local optima, especially if doing that would ruin your global optimum. When you have a goose that lays golden eggs, don't risk the goose for an egg. YC's economic interest in HN is having it be a happy, thriving community. That dominates all other considerations put together. A fast way to ruin that would be to destroy the community's good faith by suppressing negative posts about YC or YC startups. In addition to being wrong (we wouldn't want to belong to such a community ourselves), it would be dumb. If anyone wants more explanation there are posts about HN vis-à-vis YC's business interests going back years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20yc%20business%20interests&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20curiosity%20optimiz&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., which describes the simple way we try to optimize this (simple in principle, though not in execution). And see https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements/ from 2015 about HN's editorial independence. (Edit—because I've been wanting to write about this for some time and this may as well be the place:) The above is the answer I always give to questions of how HN serves YC's business, because it's true and it's solid economics. It's the right answer to give to anyone who's looking at the question through a cynical economic lens (as we all have been trained to do) since it basically says "we can be even more cynically self-interested by not doing that". However, I also always feel a little bad after giving that answer because it's not the deeper truth. The deeper truth is that we just feel this way. HN and YC grew up together. In a way they are siblings, and one doesn't exploit one's sibling. Or, to switch metaphors: because HN and YC grew together, the connections between them are complex and organic, like the connections between brain hemispheres. If you get in there and start snipping and moving things around, you'll probably lobotomize yourself. If you want a hard-nosed business reason for how HN makes money for YC, one is: it leads to people starting startups that wouldn't otherwise exist, and it leads to YC funding startups that it wouldn't otherwise get to fund. That's how HN adds to YC's core business (edit: but see [1] below). I use that reasoning to explain to people why we don't need to sell ads on HN or do other things to monetize it or drive growth. Again, though, it doesn't capture how I (and I think most at YC) really think and feel about HN. The deeper truth is the two have always been together and we can't imagine them otherwise. In other words, the value of HN to YC is intangible. That affects how we operate HN. If the value were tangible, then snipping things and moving them around and generally being bustling and managerial would be the way to go, or at least the most likely thing that people inside a business would do. But since it's intangible, all that kind of thing gets supplanted by a general feeling of "this is good, don't fuck it up". Since the main indicator of whether we're fucking it up or not is the community, the way HN can most add value to YC is by keeping the community happy. Happiness means interest (HN is supposed to be interesting) and trust (a community can't exist without trust). This is not a paradise that will last forever—it's a historical accident that an internet forum ended up in a sweet spot vis-à-vis the company that owns it, where the business is better off optimizing for the forum being good and happy than by banner ads or growth hacking. But we all know that it's an honor to get to be stewards of a community in that way, and while nothing lasts forever, we want to keep it going as long as possible, and maybe longer than one could reasonably have thought possible. [1] edit: for some reason I forgot to mention the three formal things that HN also gives to YC: job ads for YC startups, Launch HNs for YC startups, and displaying YC founder usernames in orange to other YC founders. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23293437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23293437 for more.