10 ms·

I really wish there was more transparency around mod actions

tombert 8mo ago
I think generally the mods like to avoid anything involving "politics" since it's likely to start a flame war. The issue, of course, is that literally anything can be "political", and moreover by trying to actively avoid political discussions you sort of tacitly endorse the status quo. It's a tough line to draw, and I'd be lying if I said where I knew where to draw it; HN is a fun forum specifically because the moderation is generally very good. They're not perfect but they do try and shut things down before they devolve into flame wars and personal insults. If there weren't aggressive modding, HN would devolve into 4chan or 8chan, and it wouldn't be appealing to me after the age of ~17.
- messe 8mo ago
  The limit should be outright fascism. It's not a tough line to draw if you've any inkling of 20th century history. The USA isn't sleepwalking, it's goose-stepping into a fucking nightmare.
  - tombert 8mo ago
    Yeah that's fair. I mean, you can look at my comment history, I'm not above commenting on the bullshit from the Trump administration.
- tavavex 8mo ago
  It is a difficult issue. For the longest time, the status quo-favoring position of not complaining about anything divisive too much worked well because the status quo had been relatively unchanging - most people grew up with it so everyone took it for granted, and even most types of pushback was far more reserved than what we see today. But now that the status quo of Western countries had begun rapidly shifting into something completely different, the other side of that initial ruling is starting to bear fruit. I really think that at this point they should revisit this policy - not to abandon moderation, but make amends that try to distance this place from the current political establishment. What was yesterday's implicit favoring of the boring consensus is now a defined position that's supportive of whatever the current powers do. But, being more cynical, given how close HN is to Y Combinator, I'm not sure if that option is on the table.
- deeg 8mo ago
  I've been frustrated by the flagging (because fascism is so real right now) but I've been a moderator in the past and I know it's impossible to keep a large majority happy. It's hard for me to criticize the mods much.
  - tombert 8mo ago
    Yeah, I’ve been a mod on a relatively small Discord server (~60 users) and even in that scope it can be difficult to keep people happy with stuff I’ve done.
    - tartoran 8mo ago
      Best way to mod is to strive to keep discourse civil (by setting up a policy) but at the same time let people talk about what hey want to talk. Not letting them talk because they may fight or disagree is a patronizing behavior.
      - tombert 8mo ago
        Makes enough sense. I'm not a mod of that server anymore because I got an in argument with the server's owner, and decided to leave, so I haven't gotten to practice my mod stuff in awhile.
- dang 8mo ago
  > the mods like to avoid anything involving "politics" since it's likely to start a flame war. You're correct that we like to avoid flamewars, but not correct to say "anything involving politics". We don't try to (or want to) avoid politics altogether—a certain number of threads with political overlap have always been part of the mix here*. For (reams of) past explanations see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... What we want to avoid is HN being taken over by politics altogether, and thereby turning into an entirely different site. We want HN to adhere to its mandate, which is to optimize for intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). That certainly includes some political discussion, but (a) not beyond a certain threshold, and (b) not every kind of political story or article. (For example, opinion pieces are usually less of a fit than stories which contain significant new information, and so on.) Unfortunately, this way of doing things inevitably generates conflict. For politically passionate users, that "not beyond a certain threshold" bit is far too little—especially in turbulent times, as now. Apart from that, there's no agreement on which particular stories deserve to be on the frontpage, and even if there were such agreement, there's still no way of making sure that the most deserving stories get the spots (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306). Everyone has the experience of being frustrated when a story that they care about gets flagged or otherwise falls in rank. When feelings are running hot, people jump to the conclusion that we're secretly on the opposite political side, or trying to suppress discussion on a particular topic. That's not the case at all—it's all explicable by the principles that we've been repeating for years—but that none of that changes how it feels. Then there are the users who feel like HN has gotten too political and is a shadow of its former self—this also has always been with us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. Double unfortunately, I don't know of a fix for any of these binds, because all of them derive from the fundamentals of what HN is - e.g. a single frontpage with only so many slots (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20front%20scarce&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). (* Or to put it differently, note the words most and probably in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, as pg once said: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426.)
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago
  We would have curtailed the AI discussion years ago of preventing flame wars was the primary issue. I do think that they simply cling to outdated sentiments that politics is "dirty laundry" to take out instead of properly cleaning hoise.
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  The main reason to avoid flamewars is to protect the atmosphere on HN but you can't make the case that if the world is on fire we can just sit here and pretend it isn't happening and discuss the latest tweak to react as though it is the most important thing in the world. I've long argued for a 'other' category as one overflow method or a homepage that is generic and subject specific pages for those that only want LLM news or Apple. I'm sure we could agree on a 10 level 'top' set with 'All' the default. That's one step closer to Reddit of course, but with the growth that HN has seen over the years you can't continue to pretend that the 'small town' measures still apply to this big city. A lot of this really is just about scale and you need to adapt to scale.
  - zahlman 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - TimorousBestie 8mo ago
      If I were in your shoes, I would consider dang’s response in this thread and contemplate whether this is the correct forum for your style of political analysis. I did observe some of this activity over the past couple days and note that many of your interlocutors were also flagged, downvoted, etc., and not always for clearly legitimate reasons. I turned on showdead for a while just to follow the plot. So it goes. I think it’s a good policy (in general, not specific to HN) to match your interlocutor’s effort. There’s no return on investment in any case.
      - zahlman 8mo ago
        I always have showdead on. I turned it on as soon as I learned that there was such a feature. Even the crypto scam posts amuse me. I don't feel that I have a particular "style" of political analysis. In the case of ICE I'm not even doing political analysis; it's legal analysis. I don't like seeing my communities swell with outrage that appears, to me, to be based on propaganda and ignorance. I would not be talking about these topics otherwise. And my defenses are not based in ideology, unless "the terms people are using here describe really serious terrible things, and shouldn't be abused" is an ideology. I don't like being dissuaded from responding to it, because without any reassurance that it will be cleaned up as off-topic, that comes across to me as suppressing an opposed point of view. That especially galls on platforms that otherwise appear committed to open discussion of contentious topics.
throwworhtthrow 8mo ago
The mods (dang and tomhow) have written probably 50,000 words on the subject. I've also emailed the mods and promptly received personal replies. Transparent as you could ever hope for: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
- messe 8mo ago
  So the explanation for this removal condemning the ongoing fascist revolt in the US is where? At least that's what it looks like to an outside observer from elsewhere in the world. It's been fascinating as an outsider to watch your republicans suddenly unsure about the second amendment after the last few days.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - cmurf 8mo ago
    There's no uncertainty. Republicans now openly assert the 2nd amendment belongs to supporters and defenders of the regime, and no one else. The movement opposes equality because equality stands opposed to their need for hierarchy. It is a domination and submission movement. It boasts about its application of double standards. Double standards are not logical fallacies, when they use them they are virtues. To enjoy for themselves what they deny to others is a display of dominance.
  - scq 8mo ago
    Mods didn't remove it, user flags did.
    - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
      The issue isn't the flaggers per se. It's that moderators show no interest to seriously investigating flagging patterns. Its very similar to ICE. Obviously they are guilty, but I place the real blame on lawmakers' hesitancy to tale actions to reel this in. They have the power to do so and won't even investigate the issue in ways the public cannot. That's complicicy.
dang 8mo ago
Let me see if I can outline how we approach this in a way that might make sense to you... People use the word "transparency" to mean different things. Here are the ways in which I think it's fair to say we're transparent about mod actions: (1) we explain the principles that we apply, frequently and at length; and (2) we're happy to answer questions, including about specific cases. What we don't do is publish a complete moderation log. To understand why, it's probably easiest to look through my past answers about this at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22moderation%20log%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189. In our experience, the current approach is a reasonable balance between the tradeoffs. It's true that we don't see all the comments like the ones you posted here, and we can't address what we don't see. It's also true that, as volume has grown, we've found it harder to reply to absolutely every question. But it's still eminently possible to get an answer if you want one—especially if you're asking in a way that signals good faith*. (*I add the latter bit because some people use the format of "asking a question" as way of being aggressive and in such cases we may respond otherwise than by taking the question literally. That's pretty rare though.)
- zzleeper 8mo ago
  The problem is that a relatively small group of people (flaggers) just veto what we see and don't see. This made sense when we relied on flagging to just remove spam, useless posts, etc. but its now being used to remove anything that goes against MAGA. I'm pretty sure that if you sqldump the list of flaggers of this and other posts (like the MN posts) you will find it's not a uniformly distributed list of users.
  - dang 8mo ago
    You've replied before I even had a chance to add a second sentence! Edit: admittedly it is taking longer than usual... I've answered that point many times, e.g. recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818. If you take a look at that and have a question that isn't answered there (or here), I'd be happy to take a crack at it. I haven't had a chance to look at the flaggers of these recent stories to verify that they fit the same pattern, but the pattern is so well-established that it would be shocking if they didn't. Btw, when you say "anything that goes against MAGA", the converse is the case as well (possibly even a bit more so). And when I say (quoting the comment I just linked to): > There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights. ... I didn't add that we do this the same way in either political direction, because that goes without saying, or ought to. But I'm saying it explicitly here.
hysan 8mo ago
I think it isn’t mod actions but rather the very likely fact that there is a small, but large enough group of flaggers who will act in unison to remove any such post from the front page. If you want an affirmation of the efficacy of the moderation system, what you should want is transparency into the voting behaviors of the population. If you see a heavy voting correlation between flagged posts and either a specific set of users, voting timing (these types of posts get flagged much earlier than those that lean the other way politically), or both, then there is cause for concern that the algorithm of HN’s self moderation tools is being gamed. My bet is that it’s not the mods doing anything, but rather that there is already a critical mass of flag happy users that are controlling what gets to stay on the front page. I think it would be very interesting to see a write up on this topic, but it’s highly unlikely because I think it would violate privacy and user expectations of anonymity.
- Schmerika 8mo ago
  > it isn’t mod actions It's intentional inaction. From the mods. This post, and many many others, ought to have been unflagged. So, so, so many popular and active stories about Musk and DOGE and Trump have been removed this past year, while at the same time Garry Tan and PG were cheering them on on their Twitter feeds. People who call this out too much get banned. For super unrelated reasons, apparently. Dang has explicitly disallowed any and all posts talking about the weaknesses of the flag system. IT'S PROTECTED.
- slumberlust 8mo ago
  Close. Takes tenured accounts to unflag and any schmohawk can flag. That dicotomy alone makes things way more likely to be flagged on average.
  - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
    Very tenured apparently. I certainly can't unflag and I'm relatively active on a mature account. I do wonder of boosting the flag threshold for posts to double that of a downvote would change much. Probably not depending on the flag threshold and of this truly is coordinatied
runjake 8mo ago
Does this help? https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged

I think generally the mods like to avoid anything involving "politics" since it's likely to start a flame war. The issue, of course, is that literally anything can be "political", and moreover by trying to actively avoid political discussions you sort of tacitly endorse the status quo. It's a tough line to draw, and I'd be lying if I said where I knew where to draw it; HN is a fun forum specifically because the moderation is generally very good. They're not perfect but they do try and shut things down before they devolve into flame wars and personal insults. If there weren't aggressive modding, HN would devolve into 4chan or 8chan, and it wouldn't be appealing to me after the age of ~17.

messe 8mo ago
The limit should be outright fascism. It's not a tough line to draw if you've any inkling of 20th century history. The USA isn't sleepwalking, it's goose-stepping into a fucking nightmare.
- tombert 8mo ago
  Yeah that's fair. I mean, you can look at my comment history, I'm not above commenting on the bullshit from the Trump administration.
tavavex 8mo ago
It is a difficult issue. For the longest time, the status quo-favoring position of not complaining about anything divisive too much worked well because the status quo had been relatively unchanging - most people grew up with it so everyone took it for granted, and even most types of pushback was far more reserved than what we see today. But now that the status quo of Western countries had begun rapidly shifting into something completely different, the other side of that initial ruling is starting to bear fruit. I really think that at this point they should revisit this policy - not to abandon moderation, but make amends that try to distance this place from the current political establishment. What was yesterday's implicit favoring of the boring consensus is now a defined position that's supportive of whatever the current powers do. But, being more cynical, given how close HN is to Y Combinator, I'm not sure if that option is on the table.
deeg 8mo ago
I've been frustrated by the flagging (because fascism is so real right now) but I've been a moderator in the past and I know it's impossible to keep a large majority happy. It's hard for me to criticize the mods much.
- tombert 8mo ago
  Yeah, I’ve been a mod on a relatively small Discord server (~60 users) and even in that scope it can be difficult to keep people happy with stuff I’ve done.
  - tartoran 8mo ago
    Best way to mod is to strive to keep discourse civil (by setting up a policy) but at the same time let people talk about what hey want to talk. Not letting them talk because they may fight or disagree is a patronizing behavior.
    - tombert 8mo ago
      Makes enough sense. I'm not a mod of that server anymore because I got an in argument with the server's owner, and decided to leave, so I haven't gotten to practice my mod stuff in awhile.
dang 8mo ago
> the mods like to avoid anything involving "politics" since it's likely to start a flame war. You're correct that we like to avoid flamewars, but not correct to say "anything involving politics". We don't try to (or want to) avoid politics altogether—a certain number of threads with political overlap have always been part of the mix here*. For (reams of) past explanations see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... What we want to avoid is HN being taken over by politics altogether, and thereby turning into an entirely different site. We want HN to adhere to its mandate, which is to optimize for intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). That certainly includes some political discussion, but (a) not beyond a certain threshold, and (b) not every kind of political story or article. (For example, opinion pieces are usually less of a fit than stories which contain significant new information, and so on.) Unfortunately, this way of doing things inevitably generates conflict. For politically passionate users, that "not beyond a certain threshold" bit is far too little—especially in turbulent times, as now. Apart from that, there's no agreement on which particular stories deserve to be on the frontpage, and even if there were such agreement, there's still no way of making sure that the most deserving stories get the spots (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306). Everyone has the experience of being frustrated when a story that they care about gets flagged or otherwise falls in rank. When feelings are running hot, people jump to the conclusion that we're secretly on the opposite political side, or trying to suppress discussion on a particular topic. That's not the case at all—it's all explicable by the principles that we've been repeating for years—but that none of that changes how it feels. Then there are the users who feel like HN has gotten too political and is a shadow of its former self—this also has always been with us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. Double unfortunately, I don't know of a fix for any of these binds, because all of them derive from the fundamentals of what HN is - e.g. a single frontpage with only so many slots (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20front%20scarce&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). (* Or to put it differently, note the words most and probably in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, as pg once said: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426.)
johnnyanmac 8mo ago
We would have curtailed the AI discussion years ago of preventing flame wars was the primary issue. I do think that they simply cling to outdated sentiments that politics is "dirty laundry" to take out instead of properly cleaning hoise.
jacquesm 8mo ago
The main reason to avoid flamewars is to protect the atmosphere on HN but you can't make the case that if the world is on fire we can just sit here and pretend it isn't happening and discuss the latest tweak to react as though it is the most important thing in the world. I've long argued for a 'other' category as one overflow method or a homepage that is generic and subject specific pages for those that only want LLM news or Apple. I'm sure we could agree on a 10 level 'top' set with 'All' the default. That's one step closer to Reddit of course, but with the growth that HN has seen over the years you can't continue to pretend that the 'small town' measures still apply to this big city. A lot of this really is just about scale and you need to adapt to scale.
- zahlman 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - TimorousBestie 8mo ago
    If I were in your shoes, I would consider dang’s response in this thread and contemplate whether this is the correct forum for your style of political analysis. I did observe some of this activity over the past couple days and note that many of your interlocutors were also flagged, downvoted, etc., and not always for clearly legitimate reasons. I turned on showdead for a while just to follow the plot. So it goes. I think it’s a good policy (in general, not specific to HN) to match your interlocutor’s effort. There’s no return on investment in any case.
    - zahlman 8mo ago
      I always have showdead on. I turned it on as soon as I learned that there was such a feature. Even the crypto scam posts amuse me. I don't feel that I have a particular "style" of political analysis. In the case of ICE I'm not even doing political analysis; it's legal analysis. I don't like seeing my communities swell with outrage that appears, to me, to be based on propaganda and ignorance. I would not be talking about these topics otherwise. And my defenses are not based in ideology, unless "the terms people are using here describe really serious terrible things, and shouldn't be abused" is an ideology. I don't like being dissuaded from responding to it, because without any reassurance that it will be cleaned up as off-topic, that comes across to me as suppressing an opposed point of view. That especially galls on platforms that otherwise appear committed to open discussion of contentious topics.

throwworhtthrow 8mo ago

The mods (dang and tomhow) have written probably 50,000 words on the subject. I've also emailed the mods and promptly received personal replies. Transparent as you could ever hope for: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

messe 8mo ago
So the explanation for this removal condemning the ongoing fascist revolt in the US is where? At least that's what it looks like to an outside observer from elsewhere in the world. It's been fascinating as an outsider to watch your republicans suddenly unsure about the second amendment after the last few days.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- cmurf 8mo ago
  There's no uncertainty. Republicans now openly assert the 2nd amendment belongs to supporters and defenders of the regime, and no one else. The movement opposes equality because equality stands opposed to their need for hierarchy. It is a domination and submission movement. It boasts about its application of double standards. Double standards are not logical fallacies, when they use them they are virtues. To enjoy for themselves what they deny to others is a display of dominance.
- scq 8mo ago
  Mods didn't remove it, user flags did.
  - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
    The issue isn't the flaggers per se. It's that moderators show no interest to seriously investigating flagging patterns. Its very similar to ICE. Obviously they are guilty, but I place the real blame on lawmakers' hesitancy to tale actions to reel this in. They have the power to do so and won't even investigate the issue in ways the public cannot. That's complicicy.

dang 8mo ago

Let me see if I can outline how we approach this in a way that might make sense to you... People use the word "transparency" to mean different things. Here are the ways in which I think it's fair to say we're transparent about mod actions: (1) we explain the principles that we apply, frequently and at length; and (2) we're happy to answer questions, including about specific cases. What we don't do is publish a complete moderation log. To understand why, it's probably easiest to look through my past answers about this at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22moderation%20log%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189. In our experience, the current approach is a reasonable balance between the tradeoffs. It's true that we don't see all the comments like the ones you posted here, and we can't address what we don't see. It's also true that, as volume has grown, we've found it harder to reply to absolutely every question. But it's still eminently possible to get an answer if you want one—especially if you're asking in a way that signals good faith*. (*I add the latter bit because some people use the format of "asking a question" as way of being aggressive and in such cases we may respond otherwise than by taking the question literally. That's pretty rare though.)

zzleeper 8mo ago
The problem is that a relatively small group of people (flaggers) just veto what we see and don't see. This made sense when we relied on flagging to just remove spam, useless posts, etc. but its now being used to remove anything that goes against MAGA. I'm pretty sure that if you sqldump the list of flaggers of this and other posts (like the MN posts) you will find it's not a uniformly distributed list of users.
- dang 8mo ago
  You've replied before I even had a chance to add a second sentence! Edit: admittedly it is taking longer than usual... I've answered that point many times, e.g. recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818. If you take a look at that and have a question that isn't answered there (or here), I'd be happy to take a crack at it. I haven't had a chance to look at the flaggers of these recent stories to verify that they fit the same pattern, but the pattern is so well-established that it would be shocking if they didn't. Btw, when you say "anything that goes against MAGA", the converse is the case as well (possibly even a bit more so). And when I say (quoting the comment I just linked to): > There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights. ... I didn't add that we do this the same way in either political direction, because that goes without saying, or ought to. But I'm saying it explicitly here.

hysan 8mo ago

I think it isn’t mod actions but rather the very likely fact that there is a small, but large enough group of flaggers who will act in unison to remove any such post from the front page. If you want an affirmation of the efficacy of the moderation system, what you should want is transparency into the voting behaviors of the population. If you see a heavy voting correlation between flagged posts and either a specific set of users, voting timing (these types of posts get flagged much earlier than those that lean the other way politically), or both, then there is cause for concern that the algorithm of HN’s self moderation tools is being gamed. My bet is that it’s not the mods doing anything, but rather that there is already a critical mass of flag happy users that are controlling what gets to stay on the front page. I think it would be very interesting to see a write up on this topic, but it’s highly unlikely because I think it would violate privacy and user expectations of anonymity.

Schmerika 8mo ago
> it isn’t mod actions It's intentional inaction. From the mods. This post, and many many others, ought to have been unflagged. So, so, so many popular and active stories about Musk and DOGE and Trump have been removed this past year, while at the same time Garry Tan and PG were cheering them on on their Twitter feeds. People who call this out too much get banned. For super unrelated reasons, apparently. Dang has explicitly disallowed any and all posts talking about the weaknesses of the flag system. IT'S PROTECTED.
slumberlust 8mo ago
Close. Takes tenured accounts to unflag and any schmohawk can flag. That dicotomy alone makes things way more likely to be flagged on average.
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago
  Very tenured apparently. I certainly can't unflag and I'm relatively active on a mature account. I do wonder of boosting the flag threshold for posts to double that of a downvote would change much. Probably not depending on the flag threshold and of this truly is coordinatied

runjake 8mo ago

Does this help? https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged