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Hackernews has "protected people", typically high-ranking Silicon Valley types, for whom, if it is revealed they are scumbags, they will run interference, chang

Hackernews has "protected people", typically high-ranking Silicon Valley types, for whom, if it is revealed they are scumbags, they will run interference, changing account names and replacing their powerwords with [redacted]. An example is the high-ranking GitHub engineer who has an Indian first name but goes by "Alex", who was accused of mistreating women, and actually pled guilty to at least one incidence of such.

dang 2y ago
Renaming accounts, redacting posts, etc. are all things that we do for users in general. We make no distinction between "high-ranking" users and others. We take care of these requests every day and have bent over backwards (e.g. spending hours writing code) to help people individually in cases where their needs were unusually complex. I can tell you for sure that whether the person is high- or low-status in $whoever's eyes has nothing to do with this. Often I don't even know who the person is. Our approach boils down to this: we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. It doesn't matter who the "anyone" is. Countless times I've deleted posts, redacted personal data and/or randomized usernames for accounts that had long been abusing and trolling HN. I don't rub their nose in it—I just pretend not to have noticed. You'd be surprised how polite and thankful people become when they need something. I'm not surprised to see accounts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732721 being scurrilously silly, but you've been around here long enough to know better. Edit: here's the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343. It's a more complete explanation than I have time to give right now, and nothing has changed since then.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  I was totally unaware that HN mods would treat certain accounts better than others, and give special anonymous edits, totally news to me. I have seen a lot of selective application of HN rules over the (many) years. My 2 cents.
  - gnabgib 2y ago
    All these features are covered in the FAQ What does [deleted] mean?, Can I change my username?, Can I delete my account? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
    - monero-xmr 2y ago
      Strange you can change the username for a specific comment vs. all comments. It makes it so that a comment is attributed to someone else. Very odd.
      - dang 2y ago
        In case it's of interest, here's the standard language from emails I send people: We try not to delete posts that got replies, because doing so would be unfair to the other commenters in the thread. What I've done so far is reassign it to a random user ID, so it's as if you'd used a throwaway account to post it and there's no link to your main account. Does that work?
        efreak 2y ago
        As I just mentioned in a previous comment, I'd like to note how much I appreciate that you keep the contents of posts with replies. It's not only unfair to other commenters, it can also be unfair to readers. There's nothing worse than seeing only one side of a discussion, where the possibly-useful information was purged or edited into personal attacks on the other user. I much prefer SO-style attributed edits (though for a discussion forum this should be limited to mods, not arbitrary users), but time-limited editing with manual thought out exceptions as implemented here is a close second, far preferable to Reddit and other forums that allow arbitrary editing forever and only show a date (if that).
        monero-xmr 2y ago
        Sure, it is just a strange feature that me, being someone who has been posting here a long time, didn't know
- j-bos 2y ago
  Thanks dang
  - cbsmith 2y ago
    I want to double down on this. I have (unintentionally) run a foul of HN's guidelines, and dang has been extremely polite, patient, and even-handed. I'm definitely not getting preferential treatment. I'm highly skeptical of claims to the contrary.
    - mind-blight 2y ago
      Ditto. Whenever I messed up, dang always did a great job listening to my explanation and helping to correct. Honestly, he's more lenient in posts that are negative to YC companies to prevent any chance of favoritism (I've experienced this directly when bakinyg posts or comments that are critical of one of them)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jonathankoren 2y ago
  This is a trash policy. It's reputation laundering as a service.
  - dang 2y ago
    I know it's easy to feel that way when the user asking for help has been labeled $bad for whatever reason. But I doubt you would say that about most of the users who ask for this help, and if we're going to do it for some, I don't feel comfortable picking who gets helped and who doesn't. Nor do I think the community would support us in doing it that way.
    - jonathankoren 2y ago
      It’s not about picking. It’s about doing it at all. Now you’re active participant in a cover up. They want to delete something, edit something? Fine. The controls are there. Everyone knows that. But that’s not what this is. This is taking extraordinary action to gaslight and coverup. That’s what’s trash. It’s the secrecy. It’s changing of the archive. That’s what trash. In all my decades of dealing with public forums, I have never seen this as something done in a reputable forum, outside of a court order. It’s a betrayal of trust. The fact that you’re not defending it on the merits, but rather that it’s supposedly open to all that knew about the secret door is just the chef’s kiss of abuse of power. If I was asked to do this, I would quit. Dang, every time you do this, it shows contempt to everyone on this forum. It’s absolute trash. It is bad, and you should feel bad. But of course, you don’t feel bad about doing it. You feel good about it.
      - dang 2y ago
        I just don't think you would say that if you saw the full range of requests we get. Some feel excessively fussy to me (ok, a lot feel that way) but some are coming from people in genuine distress.
        jonathankoren 2y ago
        I do not care. People fuck up all the time. It’s not anyone’s job to bail them out from their actions.
- webappguy 2y ago
  Why not just allow users to do on their own?
  - dang 2y ago
    For a few reasons: there are lots of ways to abuse those features, which unfortunately some people would take advantage of; we want to preserve the history of the threads rather than have them be gutted or anachronistically edited; and because wholesale deletion would be unfair to the other commenters who participated in a thread (pg wrote about that way back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226). That doesn't mean we don't care about protecting users with privacy and other concerns—we certainly do, and like I said we take care of these every day. We just try to do it with more precise tools than wholesale deletion. It's fundamentally a tradeoff: we're trying to balance the community interests of a public forum with the need to protect individuals. There's no perfect answer, but we're committed to both sides of it. Of the people who ask us for these things, well over 90% end up satisfied. Probably over 99%, but I don't want to make claims I'm not sure of!
- WireFraudSpammy 2y ago
  Dang thanks for the explanation, it is tough for you being the sole moderator here. Is gnabgib an actual moderator here or did he made a bot account that does regex matching to some words to try to do backseat moderating to farm points? His account made numerous robotic comments that missed the key context which a human would not have missed.
  - dang 2y ago
    gnabgib isn't a moderator but as far as I know is a genuine user and human being and valued contributor! p.s. I'm not the sole moderator here, fortunately—just the only one who posts publicly.
saagarjha 2y ago
Hacker News will do this for basically anyone. Or you can run a script to do it. It’s not particularly special.
Aeolun 2y ago
I’m inclined towards believing highly ranking people are more interested in reputation management, and that’s why they request these things a lot more often. I’ve literally never felt the need to request a change, even though I’ve written a bunch of boneheaded stuff.
- dang 2y ago
  In fact it's the other way around—at least to judge by the HN inbox. We rarely get these requests from highly ranking people (at least not anyone I recognize as such), and we get the most elaborate and demanding requests from people who don't appear to have much public reputation to worry about, and often are anonymous to begin with. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. We do get occasional corporate takedown requests, often from the lawyers of someone who noticed that someone said a bad thing about their company (or occasionally themselves) on HN years ago. But I try to do less in cases where we're not hearing from an HN user directly, and least of all when they lead with a stick (e.g. legal threats). I do check with YC's legal people though, but they love HN and totally get it and are on the community's side.
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    I think what makes HN the best place on the internet for whatever this place is, is that the god mod here is so focused on it. I can only assume you have a huge amount of scripts and tools that make operating and moderating this place manageable. I always feel like you jump in seemingly everywhere that has issues. It's quite impressive
    - dang 2y ago
      Thanks! I'm proud of my moderation browser extension with keyboard shortcuts! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20extension%20shortcut&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - which is written in Arc by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179860. On a good day, that's the kind of stuff I get to work on. But there are vastly more important factors. One is that there are other moderators. They just don't post publicly. By far the most important is HN's community. We have so many dedicated users who care about the quality of this place, and they send a steady stream of heads-ups about things we need to look at*. That's the reason for your "god mod" impression—it would be impossible for one person, or even a team, to see all these things, but what I'm actually looking at are things that other people have seen and are bringing to our/my attention, whether by flagging them or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. So it's a "given enough eyeballs" thing. We can always use more such help, so if you (or anyone) notice something that we should probably be looking at, please flag it and/or email hn@ycombinator.com. We usually can look at it pretty quickly—though it may take me longer to reply and my worst-case latency is shameful. * For example, I've got 3 or 4 emails at present asking about why "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mataroa.blog https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mataroa.blog) has been posted 14 times and keeps getting flagged. Yeah, that's probably something we should look at.

dang 2y ago

Renaming accounts, redacting posts, etc. are all things that we do for users in general. We make no distinction between "high-ranking" users and others. We take care of these requests every day and have bent over backwards (e.g. spending hours writing code) to help people individually in cases where their needs were unusually complex. I can tell you for sure that whether the person is high- or low-status in $whoever's eyes has nothing to do with this. Often I don't even know who the person is. Our approach boils down to this: we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. It doesn't matter who the "anyone" is. Countless times I've deleted posts, redacted personal data and/or randomized usernames for accounts that had long been abusing and trolling HN. I don't rub their nose in it—I just pretend not to have noticed. You'd be surprised how polite and thankful people become when they need something. I'm not surprised to see accounts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732721 being scurrilously silly, but you've been around here long enough to know better. Edit: here's the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343. It's a more complete explanation than I have time to give right now, and nothing has changed since then.

monero-xmr 2y ago
I was totally unaware that HN mods would treat certain accounts better than others, and give special anonymous edits, totally news to me. I have seen a lot of selective application of HN rules over the (many) years. My 2 cents.
- gnabgib 2y ago
  All these features are covered in the FAQ What does [deleted] mean?, Can I change my username?, Can I delete my account? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    Strange you can change the username for a specific comment vs. all comments. It makes it so that a comment is attributed to someone else. Very odd.
    - dang 2y ago
      In case it's of interest, here's the standard language from emails I send people: We try not to delete posts that got replies, because doing so would be unfair to the other commenters in the thread. What I've done so far is reassign it to a random user ID, so it's as if you'd used a throwaway account to post it and there's no link to your main account. Does that work?
      - efreak 2y ago
        As I just mentioned in a previous comment, I'd like to note how much I appreciate that you keep the contents of posts with replies. It's not only unfair to other commenters, it can also be unfair to readers. There's nothing worse than seeing only one side of a discussion, where the possibly-useful information was purged or edited into personal attacks on the other user. I much prefer SO-style attributed edits (though for a discussion forum this should be limited to mods, not arbitrary users), but time-limited editing with manual thought out exceptions as implemented here is a close second, far preferable to Reddit and other forums that allow arbitrary editing forever and only show a date (if that).
      - monero-xmr 2y ago
        Sure, it is just a strange feature that me, being someone who has been posting here a long time, didn't know
j-bos 2y ago
Thanks dang
- cbsmith 2y ago
  I want to double down on this. I have (unintentionally) run a foul of HN's guidelines, and dang has been extremely polite, patient, and even-handed. I'm definitely not getting preferential treatment. I'm highly skeptical of claims to the contrary.
  - mind-blight 2y ago
    Ditto. Whenever I messed up, dang always did a great job listening to my explanation and helping to correct. Honestly, he's more lenient in posts that are negative to YC companies to prevent any chance of favoritism (I've experienced this directly when bakinyg posts or comments that are critical of one of them)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jonathankoren 2y ago
This is a trash policy. It's reputation laundering as a service.
- dang 2y ago
  I know it's easy to feel that way when the user asking for help has been labeled $bad for whatever reason. But I doubt you would say that about most of the users who ask for this help, and if we're going to do it for some, I don't feel comfortable picking who gets helped and who doesn't. Nor do I think the community would support us in doing it that way.
  - jonathankoren 2y ago
    It’s not about picking. It’s about doing it at all. Now you’re active participant in a cover up. They want to delete something, edit something? Fine. The controls are there. Everyone knows that. But that’s not what this is. This is taking extraordinary action to gaslight and coverup. That’s what’s trash. It’s the secrecy. It’s changing of the archive. That’s what trash. In all my decades of dealing with public forums, I have never seen this as something done in a reputable forum, outside of a court order. It’s a betrayal of trust. The fact that you’re not defending it on the merits, but rather that it’s supposedly open to all that knew about the secret door is just the chef’s kiss of abuse of power. If I was asked to do this, I would quit. Dang, every time you do this, it shows contempt to everyone on this forum. It’s absolute trash. It is bad, and you should feel bad. But of course, you don’t feel bad about doing it. You feel good about it.
    - dang 2y ago
      I just don't think you would say that if you saw the full range of requests we get. Some feel excessively fussy to me (ok, a lot feel that way) but some are coming from people in genuine distress.
      - jonathankoren 2y ago
        I do not care. People fuck up all the time. It’s not anyone’s job to bail them out from their actions.
webappguy 2y ago
Why not just allow users to do on their own?
- dang 2y ago
  For a few reasons: there are lots of ways to abuse those features, which unfortunately some people would take advantage of; we want to preserve the history of the threads rather than have them be gutted or anachronistically edited; and because wholesale deletion would be unfair to the other commenters who participated in a thread (pg wrote about that way back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226). That doesn't mean we don't care about protecting users with privacy and other concerns—we certainly do, and like I said we take care of these every day. We just try to do it with more precise tools than wholesale deletion. It's fundamentally a tradeoff: we're trying to balance the community interests of a public forum with the need to protect individuals. There's no perfect answer, but we're committed to both sides of it. Of the people who ask us for these things, well over 90% end up satisfied. Probably over 99%, but I don't want to make claims I'm not sure of!
WireFraudSpammy 2y ago
Dang thanks for the explanation, it is tough for you being the sole moderator here. Is gnabgib an actual moderator here or did he made a bot account that does regex matching to some words to try to do backseat moderating to farm points? His account made numerous robotic comments that missed the key context which a human would not have missed.
- dang 2y ago
  gnabgib isn't a moderator but as far as I know is a genuine user and human being and valued contributor! p.s. I'm not the sole moderator here, fortunately—just the only one who posts publicly.

saagarjha 2y ago

Hacker News will do this for basically anyone. Or you can run a script to do it. It’s not particularly special.

Aeolun 2y ago

I’m inclined towards believing highly ranking people are more interested in reputation management, and that’s why they request these things a lot more often. I’ve literally never felt the need to request a change, even though I’ve written a bunch of boneheaded stuff.

dang 2y ago
In fact it's the other way around—at least to judge by the HN inbox. We rarely get these requests from highly ranking people (at least not anyone I recognize as such), and we get the most elaborate and demanding requests from people who don't appear to have much public reputation to worry about, and often are anonymous to begin with. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. We do get occasional corporate takedown requests, often from the lawyers of someone who noticed that someone said a bad thing about their company (or occasionally themselves) on HN years ago. But I try to do less in cases where we're not hearing from an HN user directly, and least of all when they lead with a stick (e.g. legal threats). I do check with YC's legal people though, but they love HN and totally get it and are on the community's side.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  I think what makes HN the best place on the internet for whatever this place is, is that the god mod here is so focused on it. I can only assume you have a huge amount of scripts and tools that make operating and moderating this place manageable. I always feel like you jump in seemingly everywhere that has issues. It's quite impressive
  - dang 2y ago
    Thanks! I'm proud of my moderation browser extension with keyboard shortcuts! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20extension%20shortcut&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - which is written in Arc by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179860. On a good day, that's the kind of stuff I get to work on. But there are vastly more important factors. One is that there are other moderators. They just don't post publicly. By far the most important is HN's community. We have so many dedicated users who care about the quality of this place, and they send a steady stream of heads-ups about things we need to look at*. That's the reason for your "god mod" impression—it would be impossible for one person, or even a team, to see all these things, but what I'm actually looking at are things that other people have seen and are bringing to our/my attention, whether by flagging them or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. So it's a "given enough eyeballs" thing. We can always use more such help, so if you (or anyone) notice something that we should probably be looking at, please flag it and/or email hn@ycombinator.com. We usually can look at it pretty quickly—though it may take me longer to reply and my worst-case latency is shameful. * For example, I've got 3 or 4 emails at present asking about why "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mataroa.blog https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mataroa.blog) has been posted 14 times and keeps getting flagged. Yeah, that's probably something we should look at.