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More to the point, I was going to vouch the comment (which removes the flagged status) till I got to the edits. It’s not possible to vouch it in its current sta

More to the point, I was going to vouch the comment (which removes the flagged status) till I got to the edits. It’s not possible to vouch it in its current state, because at best I’d be making a mistake, and at worst I’d lose my vouch privileges. So you’re literally making it impossible to salvage your comment when you go off on rants about censorship. There are thoughtful ways to comment about the moderation. If you take the time to phrase things in a substantive non-emotional way, and ask yourself "what am I trying to communicate?" you often end up with something that won’t be flagged. But the combination of user flags and manual mod review with the vouch system adding even more variability means that it’s a tossup whether any given decision will be reversed (or even can be reversed, since e.g. this one can’t be). It’s best to think of it like a casino and not worry on the days the cards don’t favor you. Amusingly, the change to rank flagged comments above downvoted comments in an effort to push them to places less-seen has catapulted this subthread to the second top comment of the whole submission, which I haven’t seen before. HN never fails to surprise.

andrewflnr 3y ago
Interesting. It wasn't flagged when I commented. So it got flagged, vouched, and flagged again? I hadn't heard of/seen that ordering change. Also interesting. Though I can't agree with your last line, HN is very predictable sometimes. For instance, any thread about dark matter is reliably a mess. :D
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  Bingo. It was necessary for the mods or the users to re-flag it, because it’s unsalvageable in its current form. You likely won’t hear of such ordering changes. I spend a long time watching carefully to notice them. Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who finds it fascinating. HN is so predictable as to be deterministic in certain ways, but then the complexity of the social software ends up being delightfully surprising in many more.
  - andrewflnr 3y ago
    I do find the changes interesting, but you may be the one who finds them the most fascinating. As a lazy-bones I appreciate the tip. :)
javawizard 3y ago
> I’d lose my vouch privileges Huh. Am I to understand there's a mechanism by which someone's ability to vouch can be removed on HN outside of egregious circumstances? I'm not sure how I feel about that.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  Well, yes. How else would you deal with people who abuse the vouch system? And there’s no way to distinguish between someone egregiously abusing the vouch system vs someone whose idea of what should be vouched differs enormously from what the mods want to see. Here’s how I’ve come to feel about it: the mods run the site. The site has to be run. It can’t be left to the community, because the community makes bad decisions, where "bad" means "drives intellectually curious people away from the site". Therefore, the way to get a lot of HN privileges is to create a lot of content that the mods want to see. The converse is also true; do things they don’t like, and you’ll swiftly find your privileges revoked. In many ways, it’s a proof by contradiction: it proves that centralized moderation is a strong asset, which contradicts Reddit’s philosophy of "if you don’t like it, you can go elsewhere." There’s nowhere else to go. And — fortunately or unfortunately — that’s a feature which keeps this community unified, for almost two decades.
  - javawizard 3y ago
    It's a good point; I have to say that, whatever other gripes I may sometimes have about it, HN is probably the most well moderated community I'm a part of. > How else would you deal with people who abuse the vouch system? So I think what I'm curious about is what constitutes "abuse" and how it's enforced. Like, are we saying that dang and friends have the ability to manually revoke someone's ability to vouch if they vouch for unhelpful comments on a frequent basis or if it's determined they're a sockpuppet account or something, or is there some more automated system that revokes a person's ability to vouch after some number of comments they've vouched are re-flagged? I suppose I'd always imagined that the (fairly high, in the case of downvoting) karma threshold you have to reach to obtain privileges like vouching and downvoting would do a reasonably good job at filtering out those who might abuse such privileges, and that other remedies would be used rarely - and certainly not often enough to merit your earlier comment: > It’s not possible to vouch it in its current state, because [...] at worst I’d lose my vouch privileges. and the sentiment of fear I read into it.
echelon 3y ago
> So you’re literally making it impossible to salvage your comment when you go off on rants about censorship. Fair, but this has become such a sore touch point for all of the internet. This has become one of my passion issues, and I've written about it on HN extensively [1, 2, 3, ...]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530172 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902385 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36702678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36702678
- andrewflnr 3y ago
  Your [2] is interesting in this regard. Mastodon is pretty much the modern tech ecosystem's answer to this whole scenario, and you already don't find that satisfactory. I don't disagree with your reasons, but: your objection is not really technical, but about what people do with delegated moderation authority. You counter by saying each individual should completely control what they see, but here's the dirty truth: almost no one actually wants to do that. Even if they say they do, that's a lot of effort. Even you propose something similar with "Different teams can expose their own sets of labels". Most people are just going to block a bunch of labels with no further analysis, which puts you pretty close to where we are now. In practice, delegated moderation will be rampant, and it will definitely make mistakes. So this is the detailed version of what I said in my first comment: if you get the world of protocols you say you want, and then make comments people don't like, then you won't get visible downvotes, you'll just be blocked. That really doesn't sound like it solves the problem you're raising. For my part I really don't think it's solvable at all, moderation is just going to be very difficult forever.

andrewflnr 3y ago

Interesting. It wasn't flagged when I commented. So it got flagged, vouched, and flagged again? I hadn't heard of/seen that ordering change. Also interesting. Though I can't agree with your last line, HN is very predictable sometimes. For instance, any thread about dark matter is reliably a mess. :D

sillysaurusx 3y ago
Bingo. It was necessary for the mods or the users to re-flag it, because it’s unsalvageable in its current form. You likely won’t hear of such ordering changes. I spend a long time watching carefully to notice them. Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who finds it fascinating. HN is so predictable as to be deterministic in certain ways, but then the complexity of the social software ends up being delightfully surprising in many more.
- andrewflnr 3y ago
  I do find the changes interesting, but you may be the one who finds them the most fascinating. As a lazy-bones I appreciate the tip. :)

javawizard 3y ago

> I’d lose my vouch privileges Huh. Am I to understand there's a mechanism by which someone's ability to vouch can be removed on HN outside of egregious circumstances? I'm not sure how I feel about that.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
Well, yes. How else would you deal with people who abuse the vouch system? And there’s no way to distinguish between someone egregiously abusing the vouch system vs someone whose idea of what should be vouched differs enormously from what the mods want to see. Here’s how I’ve come to feel about it: the mods run the site. The site has to be run. It can’t be left to the community, because the community makes bad decisions, where "bad" means "drives intellectually curious people away from the site". Therefore, the way to get a lot of HN privileges is to create a lot of content that the mods want to see. The converse is also true; do things they don’t like, and you’ll swiftly find your privileges revoked. In many ways, it’s a proof by contradiction: it proves that centralized moderation is a strong asset, which contradicts Reddit’s philosophy of "if you don’t like it, you can go elsewhere." There’s nowhere else to go. And — fortunately or unfortunately — that’s a feature which keeps this community unified, for almost two decades.
- javawizard 3y ago
  It's a good point; I have to say that, whatever other gripes I may sometimes have about it, HN is probably the most well moderated community I'm a part of. > How else would you deal with people who abuse the vouch system? So I think what I'm curious about is what constitutes "abuse" and how it's enforced. Like, are we saying that dang and friends have the ability to manually revoke someone's ability to vouch if they vouch for unhelpful comments on a frequent basis or if it's determined they're a sockpuppet account or something, or is there some more automated system that revokes a person's ability to vouch after some number of comments they've vouched are re-flagged? I suppose I'd always imagined that the (fairly high, in the case of downvoting) karma threshold you have to reach to obtain privileges like vouching and downvoting would do a reasonably good job at filtering out those who might abuse such privileges, and that other remedies would be used rarely - and certainly not often enough to merit your earlier comment: > It’s not possible to vouch it in its current state, because [...] at worst I’d lose my vouch privileges. and the sentiment of fear I read into it.

echelon 3y ago

> So you’re literally making it impossible to salvage your comment when you go off on rants about censorship. Fair, but this has become such a sore touch point for all of the internet. This has become one of my passion issues, and I've written about it on HN extensively [1, 2, 3, ...]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530172 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902385 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36702678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36702678

andrewflnr 3y ago
Your [2] is interesting in this regard. Mastodon is pretty much the modern tech ecosystem's answer to this whole scenario, and you already don't find that satisfactory. I don't disagree with your reasons, but: your objection is not really technical, but about what people do with delegated moderation authority. You counter by saying each individual should completely control what they see, but here's the dirty truth: almost no one actually wants to do that. Even if they say they do, that's a lot of effort. Even you propose something similar with "Different teams can expose their own sets of labels". Most people are just going to block a bunch of labels with no further analysis, which puts you pretty close to where we are now. In practice, delegated moderation will be rampant, and it will definitely make mistakes. So this is the detailed version of what I said in my first comment: if you get the world of protocols you say you want, and then make comments people don't like, then you won't get visible downvotes, you'll just be blocked. That really doesn't sound like it solves the problem you're raising. For my part I really don't think it's solvable at all, moderation is just going to be very difficult forever.