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For me, moderating less/more is not as much of an issue as the values by which commentators are being judged by, such as intellectual curiosity, positivity over
by threatofrain 5y ago
For me, moderating less/more is not as much of an issue as the values by which commentators are being judged by, such as intellectual curiosity, positivity over negativity, or fun — with specific respect to judgments on a YC-backed company on a YC forum (that being said, I'm all for fun-based moderation on technologies or politics in general).
I would feel similarly concerned if Twitter or Facebook moderated conversations on their partners or competitors by suggesting that some users weren't intellectually curious enough, or that they had entrenched positions, or that they were full of negativity, or that they weren't "fun" enough. In this perspective, judging a user by the aforementioned values seems to be the wrong tier of values for the stakes at play. I feel that community trust is what is at stake here.
Also, you have mentioned before how HN moderation is not secret. Is my account penalized in any way? Given that some users have been hellbanned before, I do feel uncomfortable with the degree of perceived transparency here. As a regular HN reader, it is not my expectation that users shall receive transparency when they are penalized.
One of my takeaways from this conversation with the user <ushakov> is that they were initially opaquely penalize, and that we would not have received clarity on this issue had you chosen not to personally respond.
- dang 5y agoI'm sorry but I don't follow what you're saying in the first two paragraphs. Re your specific account: your votes are downweighted. We do that when an account has upvoted too many stories or comments that break the site guidelines—particularly the sensational-indignant type of post, which is by far the biggest problem on HN and therefore the thing we try to dampen and downweight in every way we know how. If you want to commit to upvoting fewer such comments and/or stories, we'd be happy to take that penalty off your account. Other than that your account isn't penalized. Re transparency in general: that's a complex question. We take the following approach: we don't publish a full moderation log of every decision; we do answer specific questions when people have them. I'm not saying that's a perfect solution (it isn't, and we have ideas for making it better), but this is a super hard problem to get right. It's popular to argue "everything should all be completely transparent all the time" but having been at this job for a decade now I'm extremely wary of the unintended consequences that would have. I'll try to dig up some old links about that in case you or anyone cares. Edit: ok, there's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30141232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30141232 and a bunch more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27307075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27307075. If anyone reads those and has a question on this that I haven't already answered, I'd be happy to know what it is.
- threatofrain 5y agoFor the first two paragraphs I'm talking about your conversations with <ushakov> and the faults you've listed so far about that user. --- I've always been surprised when HN took moderation actions against my account, so it's hard for me to commit to not abusing when I don't have a clear mental compass about what is what. I just conduct myself in a way which aspires for personal authenticity in discussion. I feel sad that the sum of my behavior on this forum is considered problematic and requires penalizing.
- dang 5y agoI know that you were talking about those conversations but I don't understand what you're saying about them that I haven't already answered. Re the penalty: I don't want you to be sad so I have removed it from your account. It's kind of hard to get into the details because we don't discuss specific vote data.
- threatofrain 5y agoThanks, I'll try to be mindful about what you've said.