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The things you see on HN are not purely decided by the community. Mods can and do "freeze" the vote count on comments and posts, and do other non-obvious things
by elpocko 3y ago
The things you see on HN are not purely decided by the community. Mods can and do "freeze" the vote count on comments and posts, and do other non-obvious things too. You will notice the effect after participating for a while.
- bitcharmer 3y agoExactly, the front page is heavily moderated. Almost every day you'll see posts with 50+ upvotes falling of the front page within an hour or two when some article about LISP with < 10 upvotes will remain here for a whole day. It's disingenuous to blame it on the users when there are clearly other "forces" at play here.
- elpocko 3y agoThe "force" is actually one or two people. It's hard to prove and impossible to change. No one will believe you, either.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoIf it works.. There are a billion forums with less stringent moderation. Moderation is a very large part that makes HN good and not so game-able like most sites
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- nkurz 3y agoCould you make your accusation more clearly? Are you saying it's 'dang' and 'pg'? One or two regular users abusing the flagging system? Or a couple dark and shadowy figures who have no public presence?
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- elpocko 3y agoI don't mean to make accusations or invent "shadowy figures". HN has a very small number of moderators and their actions are not transparent, that's all.
- nkurz 3y agoThanks for clarifying. I think part of my confusion was that HN only has one moderator at this point. Also, I'd probably say "not always obvious" rather than "not transparent". While there is no public record of moderation, at least for me Dan has been excellent about answering questions when asked.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoI’m sure the HN codebase has some secret creed to make lisp more popular
- dang 3y agoThe code is written in Lisp, but it doesn't know that and has no way (edit: that I know of) to expand its empire.
- dang 3y agoYes, HN is a moderated/curated site and always has been. Here's 10 years' worth of me explaining that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20hn%20curated%20site&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... What people maybe don't realize is how many constraints there are on HN's system. There aren't many degrees of freedom for us to change things that wouldn't lead to a massively different site, and most of those outcomes would be worse, because most of them would be closer to internet default. It's easy imagine "HN, but without the things that I personally find annoying". But try to generalize that for a moment and the problem quickly becomes intractable.
- dang 3y agoWe don't freeze vote counts. What made you think that we did?
- elpocko 3y agoComments on frontpage posts that go up quickly but then suddenly don't receive any votes in any direction makes me think you do freeze vote counts.
- dang 3y agoWe definitely don't. But I'd love to see any links to posts where you've seen that—or if you see it in the future. It's an unusual case that I've never heard of before! The reason I say we definitely don't is that we'd have to write code to do that, and I'd remember writing such code.
- elpocko 3y agoThanks dang, I appreciate your efforts. I have no reason to doubt your word, and I may have imagined a pattern. I apologize for the accusation.