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"I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons

"I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases)." that feels super gross, I love mostly passively reading HN, but manipulation like that because basically it sounds like you don't want to see stuff you've seen before ... poor decision.

dang 6y ago
If you love reading HN, then you love the HN that includes us downweighting generic subthreads, because we've been doing that for years. 'Manipulation' and 'moderation' and 'curation' and so on refer to the same thing, just with different emotional valences. We're not trying to be manipulative per se, but it takes human attention to prevent the system from falling into its failure modes. It would be wonderful (especially for us!) if community action plus software were all that was neeeded for an optimal solution, but sadly they're just not. There needs to be a third component: humans who pay attention to the site as a whole and jiggle it so it doesn't degenerate. That's what we mean by moderation. When that third, human component is working well, it fades into the background and creates an impression that the system is regulating itself. That's a sort of paradise mode. But then when moderation shows up intrusively (as in my comment above), some readers feel like we're interfering with the system that exists. Actually we're already part of the system that exists, and if we weren't doing what we do, the whole system would be very different.