It’s been a privilege to help support this community and to work alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years. It’s a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving community, and I’m continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts thought and energy into it.
One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the bait and switch is on…
Thank you for doing what you do! I'm sure it isn't easy keeping this place healthy and thriving, but me and so many others really appreciate the blood, sweat and probably a few literal tears it takes :)
Not to forget — of course — the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that must've went into cushioning the brain from the occasional nervekiller comment, as well as the endo-/perilymph for the overall "mental balance".
Nice to hear someone else is looking at Arc now as well! Any chance we might see some issues on anarki resolved now? Perhaps https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/89 would be a good starting point :grin:
Jokes aside, its good to see YC cares about community, and looking forward to seeing your nick in the comments. Good luck
Indeed, from yet another Tom, glad you're doing what you're doing. HN is the best forum on the internet in no small part due to very active moderation efforts.
Hi, I'm just some young guy but i wanted to thank you for contributing to what makes this site great. It feels to me like this is one of the last bastions of the true news aggregator/comment media of old and i really appreciate everyone who dedicates time to maintaining it. Thanks <3
Thanks to you! We hope to keep the site great for people of all ages, but keeping it relevant for younger readers is something we particularly think about. You're most welcome to email us and tell us if you ever think of ways we can do better at this.
> One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the bait and switch is on…
I would love it if you could get the current HN code base into a state that it could be open sourced
I understand the desire to keep certain aspects “secret sauce” to prevent abuse, but surely that could be addressed with some kind of plugin mechanism and then just don’t open source those plugins
10MB page-weight SPA with the front page a 3 x 10 grid of image tile links coming soon. After all my background is in consumer travel and "desktop-like" business admin apps. I'm a natural for this.
The one thing that could improve HN is rendering fonts clientside on to a full screen Canvas element. Then all we need is a client-side framework for interpreting the element's pixels into HTML for screen reader support.
Welcome Tom! I want to add to the chorus saying how excellent HN has been for so many years, in large part thanks to the excellent moderation. I dove into forums early on and they have always been one of the favorite and most treasured parts of the internet. It's not an exaggeration to say that HN is one of the best ever. The longevity is commendable, especially in an industry full of fads and flameouts.
Dang and Tom, please keep doing what you're doing.
I have! It's very rare that I see a comment being flagged unfairly. Sometimes it appears as unfair to me, but then I try to look from other angles in case it's just my bias.
Also, don't forget that it's mainly other users who flag, not moderators.
Also also, it's a bit ironic coming from a 3 months old account with already negative karma. I believe HN has a problem with users who create many new accounts and don't bother to understand "what is a good thoughtful comment" and change their behaviour.
If you see a good comment in the [dead] state, you don't have to complain about it being "unfairly censored" - you can intervene to fix it by vouching for it. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
That requires the user to reach the "small karma threshold". Difficult when the user you replied to has negative karma after several months of HN participation.
I turned it on very soon after I setup my account. My own personal tolerance for speech is less aggressive than what we see here on HN. I dislike completely inaccessible history, and basic accountability is why.
Works like the trash does. Want to see how people live? Pick through the trash.
I suspect that dang has been barely surviving the (e-)moderation-technology debt (Arc notwithstanding). Good to have a second, antipodal, guy take on the burden!
Tom (and Fenn) had rockstar status back when I was involved in university CS+Entrepreneurship clubs in Melbourne around 2009/2010 (mostly led by fine students at UniMelb, but I was helping spread the word at Monash) because they were the first(maybe one of the first?) Aussies to be accepted by YC. They always generously gave their time and advice at these student events, even dropped by the SiliconBeach networking meets to share their experiences and turned out to be exceptionally kind human beings in person. Definitely the right choice for moding this community!
I remember those days (and your username) very fondly. Great to see you still here.
We were the first startup to be Australian-based then move to the U.S. for YC.
Omnisio was an all-Australian team from the year before us but they were already residing in the U.S.
The first ever Australian-originated co-founder of a YC-backed company was Jamie Cameron. He co-founded Virtualmin, a commercially-supported fork of Webmin for virtual hosting, which Jamie first released in 1997. It looks like Virtualmin is still active today, which is awesome.
It just so happens that Jamie and Fenn used to sit next to each other in the software development team at Pacific Internet in Melbourne, where we all worked in the early 00s. Jamie's brother, Michael Cameron, was a co-founder of Rome2Rio, which was based at Inspire9 along with us from about 2011-12, and became one of the most successful consumer travel startups out of Australia.
> He has been doing HN moderation work for years already and knows the site and its practices inside-out, so the only new thing you'll see is mod comments from Tom showing up in the threads the way mine do.
I wonder if there are any other secret moderators.
same. and when I learned it was Dan G I didn't accept it entirely. now it's a sort of superposition of them - and mostly a nebulous entity that maintains civil discourse - like something from a Miyazaki movie
Welcome, Tom! Y'all are making HN a place that I still love to visit every day. I find it awesome how dang et al. not only manage to keep spammers and trolls in check but also actively improve discussions by merging threads and asking people to behave.
That's a great introduction and a great opening from Tom. HN gets a second public moderator is a good sign. You would have to be crazy to agree to this but I guess brave, too!
It's always a site that's had dinner party vibes even tho it's so big. Weird! But the focus on curiosity and healthy is important.
I'm sure the features of HN are already extremely well thought out and precisely balanced, but I guess this is as good a time as any to throw out a feature idea: you know how you can favorite stories and comments? I want to favorite users, too. Maybe privately. Because it's like a bookmark thing where I can come back and see what interesting ones are doing. Just makes sense to internalize it as a list rather than externalize it into a browser bookmark list, I think. But then again, maybe a private list or yet another list would be too much!
Welcome, and thanks for striving to keep hn the bastion of intellectual curiosity that it's been in the ~9 years since I joined. I get tremendous value out of this website, and I'm very grateful for the effort you all are putting in to keep it stable.
Thanks dang and other mods for protecting this sacred corner of the web for so long. You're the guardians of the best no-BS tech news community. It is truly an under-appreciated effort.
I've (mostly quietly) enjoyed the "vibe" of HN for well over a decade now. It's certainly a major contribution to maintaining enjoyment in the crazy world of tech. Thank you for your contributions to this community which remains so special to an entire industry.
I think what comment OP is saying is that dang was working more than was healthy - “oversubscribed” meaning “subscribed above capacity,” i.e. “doing yeoman’s work,” “doing the work of two people,” “that man is like a machine,” “do you ever sleep, dude?” etc
No images. No reposting. No (public) popularity contest stats. A general vibe against politics posting. There's just not much here to attract the worst kinds of behavior.
I'm not sure if I should say "welcome" or "congrats" so maybe a little of both!
Moderation is a huge part of what makes HN so valuable, so it's good to hear dang is getting some much needed help as this place apparently won't stop growing
Thanks Tom your work is appreciated and I'm sure will be appreciated going forward. There's a whole lot of us here who really value this place, and the many fine minds who share time with us in it, and you're a big part of that.
Congrats Tom. I wonder if a particular model could be used as a baseline for these values or if they are already doing that to check first level prior to a human in the loop? I myself have been using AI for this purpose and have found it getting pretty good. I know its not a replacement for thoughtful moderation however, a tailored model for HN would also promote the tradition of HN in terms of having it not just be about who is there and have it more trained on its best practices to promote consistency, possibly as an aid.
Welcome Tom! I have been visiting this site (almost) daily for 17.5 years now thanks to the wonderful technical community and diligent behind-the-scenes moderation.
While tomhow is of course welcome, I want to express gratitude to dang for years of quite fair moderation. I've been around multiple communities and he's nothing like those power-tripping libera.chat or reddit moderators.
Right on! Thanks and good luck and please keep the ethos / vibe going the way it improbably has for all these years. I've been active online since about 1998, and HN remains unique in my experience. Kudos as always to dang for the huge role he's played in that.
Hi, I'm excited. I'm really wondering if you'll do such an excellent job like dang is doing. This is a really special community, and now it's in your hands as well.
One thing that I appreciate about dang, and PG before him, is their intellectual honesty and strong sense of ethics.
On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.
But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition, its been capable of unreasonable greatness and real authenticity.
At this point, HN is sort of the tail that wags the YC dog. There are a great many seed funds but only one HN.
It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.
> On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.
I think it's at least as plausible that this is part of the magic that makes it good. HN is sufficiently "on the margin" that they don't have to do things like placate advertisers with their moderation policies. The mods like dang, tomhow and pg mostly care about HN as users rather than owners.
> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term.
That sounds good in theory... in practice it might be the beginning of the end. Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a mission of its own. Although I'm actually not sure of the legal status of HN right now, maybe it's already something like that.
> I think it's at least as plausible that this is part of the magic that makes it good. HN is sufficiently "on the margin" that they don't have to do things like placate advertisers with their moderation policies. The mods like dang, tomhow and pg mostly care about HN as users rather than owners.
I agreed, and would say its stronger than that. Running HN well is great for Y Combinators reputation, and its focused on a relevant audience. I am sure that has to be very good for them.
> Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a mission of its own.
Over the years I've become quite jaded on non-profits personally. As they tend to appeal to the people who want to pursue an ideology rather than follow the goals of the non-profit. Which usually are at odds.
Before even the "has a mission of its own" part, an independent non-profit needs to pay its bills. I suspect that dang & Co. aren't working for free. Similar for servers & internet connections & etc.
And I'd bet that few people here want to see ads, or start paying for their accounts.
It seems a lot like the Emperor Joseph II - Mozart situation or countless others like it through history. You could ask Mozart to start a nonprofit, find customers etc. but it sure is convenient when there is a Joseph II around who appreciates the arts.
People here see ads regularly which is how hn pays the bills. YC hiring posts and company launches are all paid ads in the sense that being allowed to post them is why YC funds hn.
> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.
I was there since around 2015 and the evolution of that forum and its population/opinion has been very interesting, to say to put it mildly...
Remember when the biggest disagreements were about ORM & Frameworks? I miss those days. I didnt even mind the discussion about the ethics of Uber or Airbnb, but now, now it is different, & not for the better.
I've been here since around that time and to be honest, I haven't noticed much of a change for the worse. The world around us has changed, political life may have gotten slightly more complex, but the community feels just as friendly, curious and insightful.
Yea same for me. Nothing much has changed here. I guess it used to be a bit more technical? But just a bit (I miss the Dolphin emulator status updates - they got me hooked on the technical content posted on this site)
The whole western world is different and not for the better since 2015.
Erosion of public trust since then is tremendous and regrettable so it is not surprising that we miss the communities that once were.
So been here slightly longer and the only shift I can recall is a shift away from business to tech.
Early days had a lot more discussion about the business side of startups and vc. Then it started shifting more towards tech too the point now where startup/business discussion is mostly limited to Show/Ask posts.
The loss of chatter around the soft skills around tech (so business but also UI/UX design, design patterns, organizational approaches (like holocracy), planning processes, etc) has made HN a lot less interesting IMO. If I just wanted the usual tinfoil hat FOSS BOFH content, then I can go literally anywhere else. Reddit, Matrix, IRC, Telegram, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, they're all full of it.
Then there's the widening of scope to big social issues that's a different matter altogether.
Is this because many of the soft skills you mention were in flux/being 'disrupted' 15 years ago and since then they've become the accepted norm? I enjoyed that content too but feel like it was a time where startups were changing the face of how companies operated and now most businesses follow those models and they're not yet ripe for change again.
I honestly don't know. On the one hand you're right, we were in a time when startups were doing things like experimenting with holocracy. On the other hand, companies and cooperatives are still today experimenting with more efficient, equitable ways to get things done. I feel quite disappointed that so much of the anger over inequality in this community gets aimed at US or international politics rather than discussing things like corporate or cooperative structures which is both more grounded and more easy for many of us as practitioners to action.
To me it feels more emotional catharsis than intellectual discussion; getting mad at politics is getting mad at something you can't control and so is more of a way to air out your emotions. Getting mad at corporate structure or envisioning a cooperative is something we can control and requires more rigor to engage with.
I guess we've had a massive change in terms of remote and hybrid work practices in the past few years. Sadly even those discussions become political or angry rather than good discussions of the pros, cons, and alternatives.
Been here since 2011 and reading for a few years longer than that. I don't think the site has changed, more that the world has changed (a lot). There isn't that general excitement around consumer tech and programming that there was 15-20 years ago. We've gone from talking about how we need to start teaching coding in schools to how we shouldn't bother because AI will be doing it anyway.
The fun has been sucked out of it all. It wasn't all that long ago that we were excited by simple but fun devices like the iPad Nano and Flip camera. Now we all have phones that can shoot Hollywood films, we can access all art every created on them, and we have watches that can save our lives...and we've got a bit too used to it.
On top of that around here we used to get excited about scrappy startups raising funding and trying to change the world. Unfortunately because a number of those companies went on to dominate the world in negative ways, exploit users and hoard wealth, people have become jaded and scrappy startups are less exciting because we assume they'll eventually do something loathsome 10 years from now.
I'd love more framework debates, excitement, and creativity - but until the wider world is happy and positive again I'm not going to hold my breath.
I think HN has been gradually losing what makes it unique. The net is filled with BOFH-style pro-FOSS tinfoil hat tech content and has been since the early '90s. The joke among my college cohort about Slashdot was that IT Helpdesk 1 will have strong opinions on how MSFT execs were engaged in crazy conspiracies. You can find that kind of content anywhere that tech people talk. HN's value proposition for me has always been informed commentary; industry insiders, academics, and practitioners weighing in based on their domain expertise. Today's HN feels a lot more like a rumor mill for random people interested in tech. Along with this shift has been a widening of scope where we don't just talk about tech but also general politics. In general, HN has been gradually trending to be just another big tech subreddit.
These days HN reminds me a lot of Reddit r/programming in the early 2010s. To me this isn't a good thing because I used to come to HN to specifically get informed commentary. But there's no way for a site as big as HN to be dominated by informed content anymore because there just aren't that many people working on interesting tech in the world. So I do what most others do I suspect which is talk with friends from my alma mater and old jobs in group chats and share HN links and laugh at the unhinged, uninformed comments.
I do think at this point HN has changed its appeal. I feel that people today are attracted to HN because of its raucous, rumor-mill feel rather than informed commentary.
I really don't think that HN lets dissenting opinions thrive (well, not anything that is truly controversial but not clearly hateful). That may feel cozy but it's not a reflection of anything pure or good, imo.
My experience is that HN's Overton window is probably on average 15-20% larger than most forums. That's not uniform across all topics though. So if you skew toward a particular set of topics it may feel like a typical forum, or even in some ways more constrained.
My issue is it seems like something has to only be a bit controversial to be completely hidden from everyone. There was the recent DF article about how Gruber thinks his articles are being artificially shitlisted and I can't help but agree? I don't necessarily think the mods have their fingers on the scale, but I wouldn't be surprised if the algorithm works in a way where if enough people flag something it gets automatically hidden, and there's enough people who see DF and automatically flag it that those blog posts get hidden every time.
That site had 11 major frontpage threads in the last year, which is a lot.
Every single one of them set off the flamewar detector. That's extremely unusual. If it were one or two I'd call it random, but 11 in a row, whatever the reason, is not random. We turned off that software penalty on about half of those threads.
In his article https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i... he mentions several times that he is aiming for "comment traction," treating articles with more comments than upvotes as successful while complaining that recently there haven't been as many comments.
It does make sense that DaringFireball would consider starting a flamewar a job well done, but of course HN is optimizing for the opposite.
HN's "flamewar detector" (I prefer "spiciness indicator") is one of those tools I'd been highly skeptical of, and still have significant issues with, but ... it does in fact work much of the time. It's where it doesn't work that the problems really manifest.
I'd come to that conclusion after scraping all "past" front pages from 2006 through May-ish 2023 and doing a number of analyses of that corpus. (I've commented on that a few times here on HN and on the Fediverse.)
One of the absolute spiciest discussions ever was a pg post about HN itself. Which suggests that when a topic of of direct interest and familiarity, people will tend to hop on it. There are also a great many flame-y threads, though note that by virtue of making the front page, my sample probably skews to less disastrous threads with the absolute sh*tshows being well below the top-30 fold.
Among other weaknesses, spiciness doesn't distinguish between pure troll/clickbait threads, and those on which there's a significant and justified spread of opinion. As such, the metric makes hard discussions even harder to have, though mods can and do turn off the penalty on request (often many hours after the discussion's started, for obvious reasons, which is its own penalty). I do wish that HN could have those discussions, and I've thought and written (both on HN and in emails to mods) about what that might entail. I'm coming to the long-delayed and somewhat regrettable conclusion that it's not the right tool for that particular job.
He's known as an advocate for and analyst of (sometimes critically, often less so) one of the biggest, richest technology companies in the world. That's his whole gig.
Strong disagree here... While there are definitely those that will bury some opinions with downvotes, there are others that will upvote. Conservative, Libertarian, Progressive, Liberal and even outright Communist views get expressed in varying comments and that's just political leanings.
I only really recognize this because I'll be actively reading/replying sometimes and see comments go +/- 2-3 up or down votes back and forth on the same comment. While you may be at say -2, that's just the aggregate. I sometimes wish I could see the total up/down votes just out of curiosity.
I disagree. People will frequently say that downvoting is not for disagreeing, but in every controversial thread dissenting opinions are quickly downvoted and frequently flagged. Some recover, but many die or end up pushed down into obscurity.
Mildly controversial opinions sometimes survive and get discussion, but anything past that rarely get a reply and just get downvoted and flagged into oblivion. This isn't exactly a slight against HN, as this happens basically everywhere past a tiny userbase community. But I don't think it's particularly right to put HN on a pedestal for its ability to handle controversy.
I would also argue that shutting certain posts down early is what helps it thrive. Maybe you lose some value of topic but you gain the ability to discuss other things in depth. You also prevent pollution of discourse.
I have `showdead` enabled. It should not be the case that I find flagged posts that are good -- that are well written, don't break rules, etc -- but are flagged (presumably) due to expressing a dissenting view.
That's fair from your perspective -- although the parent's question is what would subjectively satisfy me. I don't keep a log of such instances, and I don't see a way to view my vouched posts, but it is something I observe often enough.
Sure, but the reason that question is being raised is so that we can decide for ourselves how good your evidence is - both conceptually and concretely. It certainly doesn't mean you have to share it but it makes the discussion actually meaningful.
Does that link only show vouched items of some recency? The page is literally blank (minus header and footer) for me, but it's probably been a week or so since I vouched a comment.
edit: sorry, I missed the sibling comment to this. I only ever come across dead comments, not posts. So I needed to add &kind=comment to see vouched comments.
Ah, I meant comments rather than posts (and I think flagging posts has a different meaning since one cannot downvote posts) but it looks like comments are visible by adding `&kind=comment`. Anyway, the most recent comment I vouched is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43530295 which I think is a good example of what I'm talking about.
You can vouch it, and if the comment is still [dead] but it's really good you can send an email to dang and tomhow hn@ycombinator.com Remember to include a link to the comment, and use it sparsely because it's a manual processes.
Like the parent commenter, I frequently see high quality posts via showdead. I vouch them, but I've never seen one resurrected soon after. I rarely remember to go back and check hours later, but by then the thread has died down anyway.
It takes a few vouches to unkill a comment. (The exact number is a mystery (I don't remember dang telling the number ever) and it may change from time to time (or not).)
For not-bad comments just vouch them, but for very-good-I-will-not-be-able-to-sleep-until-it-is-unkilled comments vouch and send an email.
Downvoting for disagreement has always been fine on HN. People sometimes assume otherwise because they're implicitly porting the rules from a larger site, but that's a mistake.
It has but I'm not sure this works at the scale HN operates at now. When the community was smaller, the band of opinion was narrower, so the downvote worked better. Now that the community is large I'm not sure if this scales well. Just a thought I've had over the last few years.
Downvoting pushes peoples comments down and greys them out, effectively silencing them. It creates echo chambers.
I reserve my downvotes for when arguments are made in bad faith, rely on logical fallacies, or present know-false information as an argument.
If someone presents an argument on something I disagree with, but it's made in good faith and is well-structured, it deserves an upvote, even if I still disagree afterwards.
Your very comment is now downvoted but not silenced. We all see it, as we do every grey comment, as long as one works their way down the comments page. Not every comment is going to be agreed with and rise above the fold, and that’s ok.
So you understand how echo chambers are created and are fine with it?
The problem is that there is no one with power here that can come to the "little guy's" defence. There is no will around here for that kind of support, because the only people hired to wield such power are of like mind. DJT doesn't hire democrats, and this is no different.
Look at this comment section, and tell me this isn't an echo chamber.
I don’t understand what your response has to do with what I said. Differing opinions are welcome here—particularly if they are eloquently expressed and factually supported—but that doesn’t mean they will be popular. That’s just life. Opinions, like most things, follow a normal distribution.
> Not every comment is going to be agreed with and rise above the fold, and that’s ok.
> That's just life.
Life is the result of what we choose, alone and in our groups, and groupthink creates a momentum that is hard to understand from within the group.
Only compassion gives us a clear and accurate perspective on life, my friend.
And that's a fact, and its not being a factor in this site's m.o. is precisely why it is the way it is, why it is staffed by whom it's staffed by, and why its founder has the Twitter profile picture he does and why he rails against DEI.
It's also why your opinions are so valued here, and why you don't understand what I said.
Perhaps you won't be so privleged some day and then you will begin to really understand what life is really about.
Without such a gift from life, you will most likely just continue to think you understand, while asking far fewer questions than you should.
What role does compassion play in your life? That is the most genius question you can ever ask yourself, and is really the only one worth either asking or answering.
That fact is never accepted as truth by those who already "know it all". Such is the way of "facts". Unless your knowledge base is founded upon compassion, nothing truly eloquent will be perceived as such. Such is human life, my friend. All the rest is just mammalian, when it comes to human beings in their groups.
Is your group founded on compassion? That you don't value it does not mean it is not the most valuable concept in the universe.
Is that a moderation issue? Because to me that's more of a system / culture issue.
You can't argue in people's stead. If most dissenting commentary is hurtful, inciteful, manipulative, generally demagogue, etc., it's going to get culled, and you get a situation where "dissent isn't thriving".
Moderation does participate in the culture of course, but I disagree that it would drive it necessarily. You can only do so much by reminding people to align with the posting guidelines and removing ill fitting posts and individuals.
This place would look like 4chan if it wasn't for the moderation.
Moderation absolutely drives the culture, by setting a tone that drives away certain users while attracting others.
In other words what ever issues a site has are inherently due to moderation whether it be a choice on the part the moderators or a lack of resources to moderate as they would like to.
I don't think we're actually disagreeing. Yes, moderation is key, but ultimately people post the content. As you say, it's a matter of attraction. But if the target group of attraction is empty, there's no amount of moderation that can help that.
For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.
Personally I hope Tom will bring new moderation policies that will truly let unpopular opinions thrive, but I don't have high hopes here since this is just an announcement of a new moderator, not an announcement of new moderation policies.
"Not thriv[ing]" is not the same as being quashed. Minority opinions don't always rise to the popularity or acceptance level of majority opinions, and that's OK.
Let us not use the word "thrive" or "quash" to avoid misunderstandings. To rephrase, I hope that on HN even minority opinions have reasonable rebuttals. Unfortunately what currently happens is people flag minority opinions with no discussion.
"flag" and "downvote" are two different tools with two different purposes.
"downvote" seems more appropriate for for "this is not interesting and should be less prominent".
"flag" seems more appropriate for "this should not be here at all".
By way of an example, on a political story, if you say something merely unpopular, you'll get downvotes and replies; if you say something hateful, you'll (usually) get flagged.
I agree with you, but that's not what happens for polarizing topics that are technical in nature and not political. People on HN seem to flag comments rather than downvote them.
In a way, iirc, it really is. It's as much a "I disagree" as it is "I don't like this". That said, I would like to see more people actually respond in addition to a downvote.
I don't think that's generally a function of the moderators though.
Nope, sometimes I would have a rebuttal but flagging is the better option (constructive discussion is hard without mutual respect, and/or don't feed the troll). Or, the comment doesn't even have anything to refute, it's just disrespectful or it's spam, or both.
I have flagged a few comments but I'm rarely mad.
And if one is mad because of a disrespectful comment, the flagging is probably appropriate too.
> For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.
There is a difference between expressing unpopular opinions (e.g. "manifest V3 is good"), which receive an appropriate level of considered disagreement; and expressing opinions that are removed administratively.
In my experience, the former is quite common, while the latter only occurs in cases of hateful or off-topic comments. That is as it should be. No one is obligated to agree with you, and that fact should not dissuade you from expressing yourself.
I’m a fairly steadfast holder of the “I like apples walled garden, it’s my choice to be there” argument, and I think as a dissenting opinion on this forum I get a lot of flak for it. But that’s not a moderation problem, it’s the fact that my opinion is different and I have 10x the number of people disagreeing with me than agreeing with me.
> For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.
That's not a moderation issue. You can post that opinion, and people will disagree with it, post responses to it, and downvote it. It will not be flagged out of existence, unless it's also violating site policy in other ways.
As someone who actively believes Manifest V3 is good for users, I second this: my opinion is not suppressed by this forum. It's simply unpopular among nerds, the population to whom this forum is aimed.
A polite well worded post that disagrees with the mainstream will indeed still exist, but it will be moderated to unreadably transparent and hidden by default. It’s not a great experience.
Meanwhile personal attacks and hyperbole regarding Elon Musk and Trump have become very common on HN.
> A polite well worded post that disagrees with the mainstream will indeed still exist, but it will be moderated to unreadably transparent and hidden by default. It’s not a great experience.
Speaking from personal experience only: I have mostly not observed "polite, well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream" get downvoted to oblivion, unless some other factor also applies, such as that they're also things that seem likely to lead to a rehashed old-as-the-hills disagreement with no new information that will not on balance change any minds.
If you post (by way of example only, please observe the use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads are good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive pile of downvotes, I think that's a reasonable signal that the community isn't interested in seeing iteration 47,902 of that argument, and has no expectation that anything new will come out of that argument. If you have something new to say on that topic that is likely to lead into new and interesting arguments, at this point you would need to signpost that heavily, prefacing it with some equivalent of "Please note that I'm aware this is an age-old argument, but I think I have a new point to make that is worth considering", and then actually make a new point, at which point I think you're less likely to get downvoted to oblivion.
Personally, I don't downvote "mere" disagreement. I downvote (among other things) what seems to me to be uninteresting or thoughtless or insufficiently diligent disagreement, or factually incorrect information, or anything that seems like a discussion that spawned from it will not be interesting.
Now, that said, another factor here is that some people posting on political topics in particular believe they're making "polite well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream", and others do not share that belief and flag it to oblivion. For example, posts expressing bigotry mostly get flagged, no matter how surface-level "polite" they are.
> If you post (by way of example only, please observe the use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads are good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive pile of downvotes...
Sure, I imagine the grandparent poster means arguing something like "limiting access for extensons is good because they're often used to steal financial assets". Old extensions are sold, or cracked and updated to inclue malware.
I want to avoid letting a meta-level conversation slip into object-level. But using the object-level as an example, I would expect a comment that acknowledges the types of things that are hard to build with Manifest V3, particularly more advanced adblocking, and acknowledges that there need to be solutions for those things, and makes the point that letting extensions be all-powerful does lead to problems and that also needs solving, would not get downvoted to oblivion. That's much more nuanced than, for instance, suggesting that Manifest V3 is an unalloyed good with zero problems, which I would expect to get downvoted.
I'm giving an example, which to some degree was meant as an existence proof of a way to support an unpopular position without getting massive downvotes. "X is entirely good with no problems whatsoever" being replaced by "I think the benefits of X outweigh the costs, and here's some acknowledgement of the costs". I'm not trying to suggest only one possible way to do that, or only one pattern to follow. (This is one danger of using an object-level example.)
Flagging does seem to primarily be a tool for moderation. But for comments, at least, I've mostly not observed flagging being used to hide things that shouldn't be; if anything, I think flagging is underused on comments.
(It's still regularly abused on stories as a downvote, perhaps in part because stories don't have downvotes. HN sometimes "rescues" stories that get over-flagged, but it's still a problem.)
I didn't say it was done by moderators, I said it was a tool for moderation. Flagging is the means by which regular HN users perform moderation activities, in addition to the actions available to the moderators.
Fair enough, I can see from the thread how that interpretation could arise. I would definitely interpret "moderation policy" to be policy implemented by moderators. In this case, I was responding to the statement that "flagging is not moderation", and I thought it was useful to distinguish that flagging semantically is a kind of moderation (done by users rather than by moderators).
For me the difference is that moderation by moderators is (usually) guided by some content policy, and one can disagree about the biases of the specific content policy, or disagree about applying a content policy based on topics and themes at all (as opposed to based on mere style and civility). With user actions, there is no predefined content policy, it’s just how the set of users who happen to read the specific thread or comment happen to feel.
Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading. But I also think that active moderation and crowd-sourced ranking mechanics are two different things.
It can work, but I think it's harder to scale to something the size of HN without losing some of the important properties HN has.
For example, I think it's useful that on balance the top few comments and their discussion are likely to be interesting, and the last few comments are unlikely to be interesting.
I agree it depends on the definition. Quite honestly my vibe, and really that is all it is for any of us discussing this, is pretty much anything more aggressive than my comment above (or even including my comment above, once more people read it).
I definitely DO NOT mean clear hate speech, etc.. that's not my point at all.
So, do you mean you don't like tone policing? You can say pretty much anything as long as the tone stays intellectual and doesn't go into brain damage politics, harassment, or conspiracy zone where it's being banned because it's off-topic and, frankly, exhausting and unproductive.
No, and if you read the tone of my posts and even the tone of dang (and others) here I would argue that my tone is not out of line and arguably more polite.
But I'm the one that is rate limited in this thread and prevented from interacting with people politely.
On the one hand, I think it's a bit unfair that this comment is currently downvoted as it's discussing moderation on a topic about moderation, so very much on-topic in this particular submission.
On the other hand, I think it needs to be more specific in order to be valuable feedback. Which dissenting opinions? Can you provide specific examples of comments you think got unreasonably flagged?
There's been an uptick in political posts which are off-topic per the guidelines, so an uptick in the absolute number of flagged submissions would just mean the community is properly enforcing the guidelines, which is good. However, as a consequence of that uptick in political submissions and flagging, there's also an uptick in the number of users complaining a post is unjustly flagged, because they incorrectly conflate enforcing the guidelines with political opinion, and that is not good.
I think a lot of users are tired of this back and forth, so my guess is they are reading between the lines of what you said (since you didn't provide specifics) and filling in the blank with what _they_ think you mean about undeserved flagging, with the topic of politics being top of mind at the moment. This shows that being specific helps both by providing actionable feedback while also increasing clarity, which is your responsibility as a communicator.
My understanding is that flagging does not imply moderation. When enough people flag a comment, it becomes dead automatically. There is, separately, the case that a moderator “kills” an unacceptable comment, but then it only appears as [dead] I believe (unless it was also being flagged by people). Someone correct me if this is wrong.
Well, you can call it that, but there is not a singular will or policy behind what is getting flagged, and the HN “community” isn’t homogeneous. HN users can also “vouch” to counteract flagging. It only takes a single vouch to un-kill a comment.
It’s not a decision made per individual submission or comment, I think. Of course, the specific automated mechanism exists because some human decided to implement it. My point is, in the case of the flagging mechanism, it’s not the moderators who are deciding based on the contents of the submission or comment.
A sample size of one doesn't really tell you anything in this context. HN definitely has a pretty heavy bias in some directions, it's mostly that the crowd that naturally flocks here tends to mostly agree on those topics, so you don't see conflict too often.
It is a shame that people will downvote a thing that is expressing an honest opinion.
I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.
I don't think this extends to the way that HN is moderated or run. It is worth looking at dang's posts every now and again to take in the job that he does and how patient he can be, even with antagonism aimed directly at HN or himself personally.
From time to time I also have a look at the histories of some of those antagonistic people. Frequently there are signs that their behaviour was not always like this. Recent posts might be outright abusive and sound like the postings of angry teenagers. A few years earlier they might have been posting reasonable discussions on their thesis topic or tutorials on some useful subjects. Keeping that in mind helps you realise that these are real people and there may be other things going on in their life.
I think there are some good things to learn from people who work with addicts. You can simultaneously challenge bad behaviour and be compassionate to the person who committed it. Similarly, this is why I'm not a fan of cancelling people or holding them forever accountable for past bad behaviour. If they recognise that their behaviour was bad and are endeavouring to not be that way again, I don't think permanent ostracism benefits anyone. If anything it restricts people to a community that amplifies their negative behaviour.
I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.
That's a valid use of the button by design, HN is literally made to allow for that use. Plus it mimics real life interactions - there is a social cost/friction to saying things people disagree with or think are outright wrong. Most online chitchat places deteriorate because they remove such social frictions.
I would say it mimics real life interactions of some communities. I do not think that is universal. I tend to think that the communities, in real life and online, that permit civil discussion of dissenting opinions are the healthier ones.
I think there is a far greater real life social cost in violating standards of behaviour, such as aggressive engagement, or acting without empathy. I would argue that it is those influences that can be lacking in online discussions that cause them to deteriorate. There is also a lower barrier of entry for joining an online community than joining a real life community. A few dedicated but detrimental people can always evade safeguards and pollute a community to some degree, online communities being larger provide the possibility to each individual to do more damage, while also increasing the chances of there being individuals that would do so.
I would say it mimics real life interactions of some communities. I do not think that is universal.
I would say this is straight up wrong. It is universal since it's fundamental to being a social animal. There's a cost to being at odds with a group. We do have all sorts of mechanism and rituals, formal and informal, to minimize or amortize that cost in all sorts of settings but it's still there and it's still essential. You look at the faces of your coworkers in a meeting in which you're making some unpopular proposal to see how it's going over and you feel the slight sting of recognizing the smallest hints of disapproval. It's built right into all human interaction.
Your comment being downvoted for suggesting dissenting opinions are not treated well on HN kinda makes your point. I agree in general and spend less time here because of it. HN is still not as bad as many alternatives, but I wouldn't say it's great for ideologically diverse views.
If you think your dissenting opinions should be popular, your opinions probably aren't all that dissenting. This person's dissenting meta-opinion is unpopular, it's still there and it's still being discussed. Discomfort is inherent in dissent, it's not people putting a lot of likes on your NormanRockwellFourFreedomsPainting.gif.
It's not that they need to be popular, it's that voting them down leads them to be dropped off from view (and makes it less likely dissenting views will be shared). Reddit is the extreme case of this where anything outside the majority group consensus is heresy to be voted down/hidden/banned.
Better sites don't do this and have in-good-faith discussion despite disagreement.
Can you link some of these better discussions on better sites?
Dissenting views are regularly highly visible, often as replies to consensus views. Even better - well-argued counter-narrative/counter-conventional wisdom views regularly appear as top or highly ranked comments. That's because the people making those arguments do what sensible people do when making an unpopular argument - they put in the work to make their case more persuasive. They don't sit around complaining that the other kids don't listen to them, they care about their issue enough to try to work with human nature rather than hoping some magical technology will change human nature for them.
The problem is HN is mainly left leaning so its difficult to have discussion at times as dang and the community will shut it down quickly as differing opinions are not welcome even if its factual.
(chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS nOt TrUe")
> (chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS nOt TrUe")
> (Love how HN proved my comment as correct)
Please don't do this here. It's against the site guidelines (see the bottom: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which guarantees downvotes, and then the combination of help-help-I'm-being-repressed and I-told-you-so is annoying to pretty much everyone.
Yeah, as someone who has criticized the mod team, saying you are biased is just laughable. You go out of your way to be as unbiased and user-oriented as possible. My biggest criticism is procedural, Dan and friends are doing good work.
This is largely an illusion, as can be seen by the number of people complaining in the other direction about how wacko libertarians or MAGA or whatever dominate on here.
What you're actually observing is that HN is one of the more diverse public spaces you participate in and there's no personalized algorithm that filters the content to only show what you want. When your exposure to left-leaning content goes from <10% on an algorithmic feed to ~50% on HN, it feels like being overrun.
Just know that it feels just as overwhelming to the left-leaning people on here, and they will jump to the same interpretation in the opposite direction.
If 2 people end up in a civilised debate. It’s not uncommon for people to flag and downvote the opinion they disagree with even if the opinion is valid or backed up with facts. Feelings get too hurt here.
Sure but I'm not even talking politics! My comment itself was barely a criticism of HN and, yeah, downvotes don't matter - but it's exactly what I am talking about. Any push against that coziness/bubble is not tolerated.
I do think it's OK for some forums - if the community agrees - to say certain topics (like politics) are off limits.
I don't really think it's ok for a community to say discussion about what should be discussed is off limits... or being critical of policies, the bubble, etc...
Your comment is (a) off-topic and (b) smacks of a complaint about not getting enough up-votes. Neither of these areas are looked upon positively in HN. If this style of comment is your modus operandi, it may explain why your work is not well-received, and in short it has nothing to do with the popularity of your opinions.
It's not off topic, as it's discussing moderation and the culture of the forum in a post about moderation & replying to someone discussing the culture, and I said nothing about upvotes. It is two strawmen without discussing any of the substance of my comments.
Probably because a single example at a single time point can't really be extrapolated to the entire platform across all times. The comment being downvoted proves nothing (as evidenced by the fact it's now upvoted to the 2nd top comment!)
And this comment of yours I'm replying to will probably get downvoted because it's a complaint about votes that contributes literally nothing to the conversation (in fact, detracts from it).
HN does not welcome dissenting opinions in certain areas of tech where the individual freedoms of techies come into conflict with status quo social harms to non-techies; so, for example, you won’t see many HN articles about the ethical dilemmas of working at Palantir, how our industry’s libertarian foundations obstruct labor organizing today, what advantages the ‘bros’ receive in return for their misogyny, and so on. HN is a light-touch moderation site — as libertarian as possible, in keeping with our roots — so I certainly don’t hold the mods as responsible for the community’s defensiveness in that regard. In general, whether tech or otherwise, it’s not possible for a community to welcome uncomfortable dissent against its own underpinnings without a heavier hand on the moderation wheel than is cultural acceptable for HN and for our community. That doesn’t mean that HN rejects all dissent — certainly they may be other pillars of obstinance I haven’t personally identified and studied over the past fifteen or twenty years participating here — but, yes, absolutely, HN’s community has zero tolerance for certain dissent.
Now that we have an Australian, suppose I'll have to change my tactic of waiting for dang to go to bed before being naughty, how annoying.
Nice to see another helper. Dan, you are truly wonderful and I hope you never leave us, however, I also hope this affords you some much deserved "time off". Welcome Tom, and how.
Welcome Tom, thank you and Dan for helping to run one of the best corners of the web for many of us.
Curious that you both made new accounts, is that basically a similar thing to having a "root" user then? So you can't use a normal / previous account or it will ruin it? :)
No, it's just a device to mark the context switch and to avoid misunderstandings, since the previous comments were all posted without an implicit "mod" bit.
As somebody who's seen communities come and go over the last couple of decades, I cannot praise Hacker News highly enough. And we can thank the moderators for that. HN is like an oasis for me: polite, sane, and informative, and your values and principles really shine through, especially below the fold.
> He and Gackle have discussed diversifying their team, and adding a third moderator who is non-white, non-male, and, Bell joked, “non-balding.” Gackle clarified: “We've talked to each other about that. But we wouldn't make it a requirement.”
Without any negativity on Tom, whom I'm sure is excellent, I suspect you failed on this one @dang.
It's about as clear as mine is. Weak binding between user handle and real identity has always been part of internet forum culture—at least in the deep section of the pool that HN likes to swim in.
Thanks for taking on this role tomhow! It's seriously appreciated and I'm also heaps happy that there's now someone in Oz that can moderate while dang gets some no doubt much-needed sleep! Champions! Thanks for making HN so bloody choice! Over of the best places on the 'net for damned sure!
Isn't HN self-moderating with upvote/downvote/flagging? I have an impression that the notion of moderator comes from old forums (e.g. phpBB) where they didn't have those features.
Votes are not moderation. Ignoring manipulation tactics, majority consensus does not mean that something is right, acceptable, or in line with site guidelines.
Welcome Tom, it is great that you came to Dang's aid because I was starting to worry how much longer one person could do this great job brilliantly alone.
Dang, and Tom: I think it would be useful for you two moderators to use a "special" color, instead of the light gray that is used for any other username.
The best way to provide feedback is by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. I've received a reply to literelly every email I've ever sent (all credit to Dang and Co for being extremely kind and consistent in supporting my inner troll rehabilitation effort).
There is no site mechanism to alert moderators about @mentions, and due to sheer volume of messages the site operators will typically never get to see your well-intentioned message.
This thread does have better odds of being read than most, though :) cheers
I have to say HN is one of the best moderated online forums/sites on the web. dang does a great job. Even when he disagrees with you and moderates he is open to communication, clarification and adult conversation. I really appreciate his work and have no doubt tomhow will do the same.
Good luck Tom. I do not envy the people that take on the work required to moderate this site while remaining unbiased and I am glad you are ready for the challenge. I am sure you will do a fantastic job.
you (few?) do one of the biggest jobs on the internet. it's been a bit of a vice, but sufficiently rarefied that it doesn't lower anyone for indulging it. thank you.
it's said that perfect means lacking nothing essential to its whole. I've often speculated about the mechanics behind it, but really, it's a product that I think achieves today what apple and a lot of others aspire to be, where it does something well enough that almost nobody stops to question how. even if - or especially, when - that's probably the most interesting question of all.
how do you replicate it? you can't. that's the point.
Could you or Dang please explain, why this post with 118 points and 121 comments in 3 hours, about news of the day highly relevant to anybody in Tech, only shows up on page 18?
Tom, please fix the flag abuse problem. It's gotten to the point where I realize there's no point in commenting on many threads, given my opinions, some of which are very normal nationally.
When I've found myself being publicly tsk'ed by the people around me, I've taken a moment to try go figure out why they disapprove of what I'm saying. It's been a useful life exercise.
Often times, you comment not to change the mind of the person you're replying to, but to provide a rebuttal for the readers at home. If nobody challenges problematic ideology or corrects misinformation, it can spread like a disease.
Forums like this are "censored" and that's a really good thing. We don't need a steady stream of (for example) hate for women, minorities, and trans people that you see on truly uncensored forums.
This is correct. For the people who disagree, go read Slashdot at -1 for a while. Then pretend that you're one of the people who are targeted by that vitriol, and think about how much you'd read the HN comments if they were like that.
I mean, I don’t generally like to go over somebody’s posting history because it feels like stupid very-online silliness, but they brought it up.
I see some unflagged center-right political opinions sometimes. It is stuff that a mainstream democrat would probably disagree with but find, like, not odious or offensive. Therefore I think they are just getting flagged because any political opinions here have a chance of getting flagged. This is how the website is supposed to work, if we as a community decided that mainstream political opinions were ok, the site would become a place to argue about what exactly is considered mainstream.
One major problem is when people presume that their simplistic understanding of a subject is factual, and that everyone else is going off emotion. For example, some people will erroneously claim that the 2 genetic human options are "XX = woman, XY = man". Those seem to be the most likely combinations, partly because we don't collect DNA from 100% of the population and compare it to the observed anatomy, but they're clearly and documentedly not the only options.
Even without considering trans people, it's factually untrue that "XX = woman, XY = man, and those are the only possibilities." And yet, people who stopped at high school biology will argue until they're blue in the teeth that anyone with a more nuanced take is anti-science.
Yes and some people will also make scientifically inaccurate claims like "sex is a spectrum" and "there are more than two sexes" and "it is possible for humans to change sex".
There's a great deal of misunderstanding around this topic. Having open-minded, interesting and reflective discussion about topics like this should however lead to greater understanding. But that is not possible if it gets flagged and censored.
If stating certain facts is made illegal (by our democratically-elected representatives) then by all means HN will need to censor those facts for the sake of its own self-preservation.
But until then, we should be free to state facts.
> The old adage “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it” was once a touchstone of liberal society. Having been involved for most of my adult life in areas of social debate, it was a phrase I once commonly heard. Not any more.
> Instead, public discourse is marked by efforts to find offence, destroy the character of opponents or ensure reason is smothered by emotional manipulation.
"Stating facts" does not mean you are following the other rules of the site.
For example, if you irrelevantly post "My software is on sale now for 10% off and here is the link!" on every story, everything in it is factual, but it's spam regardless.
I'm sure your specific facts that you want to post are in service of a particular social or political viewpoint you are trying to push, one that the people flagging find either off-topic or odious. And, given that you refuse to elaborate on what specific facts you think are banned, reveals that you think you only can convince people by being vague about what specifically you mean.
I'd love to be clearer about my common-sense, scientifically-backed viewpoints, but if I did so it might result in hostile action being taken against me. So I choose not to.
Not because I'm insincere about my views, or because I believe they are harmful - but because the activists pushing the ideological views I oppose have been demonstrably violent and destructive.
"Agendas" are often ideological battlegrounds. I flag comments, even those I agree with, that I recognize from experience are going to lead to the same tired, off-topic debates and flame wars.
Lately, I've also been maintaining a personal uBlock Origin filter list to hide certain prolific rule breakers. I would love if HN had an equivalent built-in "killfile"[0] functionality for auto-hiding submissions and comments. (This has been suggested to the admins, and was seemingly received favorably, but I'm sure it's a matter of resources.)
That would be very positive IMO. It would expose bad actors.
However, the bar for creating new accounts is low, so bad actors could create lots of accounts cheaply and use them for flagging. That's why I think flagging needs to be a privilege that requires a high user "trust level" - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43559629
I draw a distinction between posts and comments here.
Comments that are "pushing an agenda" are noticeable because they Just. Will. Not. Deviate. From. The. Party. Line. Ever. They will never acknowledge an opposing viewpoint's point, no matter how valid. It's not a good faith conversation, and it deserves to be both downvoted and flagged. When one side (or both!) is like talking to a brick wall, this is often what's going on.
Posts are harder. If user X posts articles pushing a viewpoint, that's harder to prove that they're intending to do that. Or it would be, except that user X will also usually be active in the discussion about the article, and their comments will fit the above pattern. If you see that, then you can say that the post was probably pushing an agenda as well.
Despite being a small-ish site, HackerNews does still suffer from the Reddit problem of having enough users that you often don’t get to really know anybody. Realistically most conversations here only go back and forth for like 3 or so comments on each side. I mean, the site is structured to promote that kind of thing; reply buttons start getting hidden after a point, right?
I don’t think anyone really can be convinced to deviate from a strongly held political belief in a handful of posts. At this point I think most people with any interest in politics have already seen every path through 4 or so posts around their opinions.
Standard talking point, standard counterpoint, standard objection that the the counterpoint is not back by data, request for citations, citation, argument that the math was wrong, and by now the thread is a week old and we’ve forgotten about it.
So, I wouldn’t say it is an issue of people being bad faith or overly obstinate. It’s just a bad format. Old phpBB boards and those sorts of sites were better for this sort of stuff, despite being mediocre, because at least you could remember who was who.
All right, here's an example. X makes a post on one side of a position. Y makes a thought-provoking reply on the other side. X replies with "So what's your point?" X either fails at reading comprehension, or X is trying to make it look like Y didn't have a point, because X doesn't have a good reply to Y's point, and X wants everybody else to not notice that Y actually had a good point.
I hate seeing that. It's a bad-faith argument. It's the sign of someone who's just there to argue, not to have a curious conversation. That is, it's a sign of someone who isn't within the spirit of the site guidelines.
No, I don't think this is just my personal bias against that style of posting. It's fake and juvenile, and it has no place on HN.
Another way you can tell: When they're replying to 20 comments with the same 2 or 3 talking points. That's someone who's there to do battle, not to have a conversation. They aren't really replying to the 20 comments, either - they're just spraying the same canned responses all over the place. That's not a conversation; that's a tape recorder in transmit-only mode.
I don't think the person getting flagged is always deserving of the dogpile. Your comment implies "you should take this time in timeout to think about your actions" which is just a gentler form of rhetorical struggle sessions, and not always warranted.
For sure. I've had comments flagged that I thought were perfectly reasonable and non-controversial. My first reaction was to be angry and annoyed. But then my kinder angels suggested that perhaps I phrased my idea poorly and people misunderstood that I was largely agreeing with them, or at least very respectfully disagreeing. And then I decided to be more careful with my phrasing next time.
Many people feel that flagging is worse than it used to be, but they don't agree at all on what should or shouldn't be flagged. That makes this feedback less actionable than one might assume.
HN gets tons and tons of threads that are critical of LLMs, so it's possible that the ones you're seeing get flagged are just below median quality and/or overly repetitive of previous discussions.
Hey, Dan. I'd be really interested if you could share more about the metrics. As the climate of the world around us has changed, I think a lot of us at least feel flagging has become a cudgel used to silence opposition. Me, for criticism of the current administration. Others, for their views on topics like gender.
Maybe we just care more and notice it about that subject now. Maybe it's always been this way. But while you often leave long comments that go into how these systems work and the struggles with trying to adjust them or understand of it's even necessary (good stuff), I would be fascinated to see a blog post or something where you really give us a talking to about the state of the community and anything y'all have been trying on your end.
Just a thought, obviously, you have a whole job moderating already! Have a good day!
Dan and Tom can speak to this, but by my reading of the guidelines, "criticism of the current administration" and "views on topics like gender" are both explicitly prohibited:
It has nothing to do with being on the side of "the opposition" or "the man," it's because those sorts of posts inevitably lead to the same, repetitive, off-topic debates and flame wars.
Flagging should be used as a cudgel against posts that break the rules. There are plenty of places on the internet to debate politics and gender; HN is not one of them.
stories that are extremely relevant to hacker news and techies.
That's a difficult argument to make, especially without examples because at the end of the day, everything is related/relevant to everything somehow. HN's on-topicness remit is not really 'extremely relevant to techies'.
A political talking point can be nationally popular but still political, so, outside the scope of the site.
Anyway, which nation? I think we also aren’t allowed to push Communist party talking points here, despite that party being highly supported in some countries (not that I’d want to, just saying, nationally popular doesn’t mean much).
A lot of people don't read the Hacker News Guidelines⁽¹⁾ before submitting and deserve to be flagged. Quoting (emphasis mine):
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Maybe he was significant to a lot of hackers. The death was also untimely, which reminds us to cherish the time we have. Many of us are in our 50s or 60s.
This is not really mysterious or anything, though, right? They allow bending of the rules for stuff that is not likely to devolve into a big stupid political flame war, because, like, pick your battles.
Also I’d expect there to be some annoying edge cases if they tried to ban that sort of discussion. I mean, Kilmer is not a tech person. But tech people die sometimes too. Arguably discussing their life as people is outside the scope of the site. Maybe we shouldn’t have had a conversation about how great a guy Mr. Moolenaar was and just discussed the technical aspects of his life’s work. But, come on, that’d not really be a human way of responding to somebody’s death, right?
If we’re going to have these sort of lightly rule breaking threads, then I don’t think it is necessary to ask the mods to adjudicate exactly who’s technical enough to warrant one. It’s a fuzzy spectrum anyway, we have tech people, tech policy people, STEM outreach people, tech YouTube influencers, celebrities that played beloved nerd characters.
One thing I'd really like to see is less tactical flagging of content.
Hopefully with your additional help, people who suppress content they disagree with will be kept in check.
Open discourse is something that used to be sacrasanct in scientific and engineering circles. Over the last decade or so, free speech has been on the decline, and discussion is now very polarised along political lines.
For example, it's nearly impossible to discuss technical progress made by Elon Musk's companies without brigading by leftwing commenters, and I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away. This is self-serving behaviour by bad actors and should be addressed in order that HN is a politically-neutral forum for discussion, and not a leftwing echo chamber.
I understand, and lament, that the world is so polarised these days. There's a limit to what we in this little corner of the web can do to correct such powerful global macro trends, but we'll continue to try our best.
If you see things that are unfairly flagged, you can email us and we'll look at them. As long as comments/submissions are within the guidelines, we'll restore them.
We want HN to be a place where people can discuss contentious topics. This is a major reason why I've moved into an expanded role here. I think HN has been, and can continue to be, one of the better places on the internet for discussing contentious topics.
The thing to remember is the guiding principle of HN is curiosity. This place is not meant to be for ideological battle, or for trying to win arguments. It's for conversations where we can learn from each other about things we're curious about.
I've always liked to learn about the opposing side of whatever position I hold. That's why I've found HN to be so valuable, and I want it to be a place people to come to for that reason for many years into the future.
Flags are issued by regular users like us though. What do you expect a moderator to do, except maybe manually intervene to "un dead" something if it seems like a case of overly biased flagging? That's assuming mods have the ability to do that (I've always assumed that they do).
Flagging content should be a privilege that comes at a certain level of trust, and the privilege should be revoked by moderators for people that use flags to further an agenda.
People do get their flagging powers revoked for misuse. There was a time when I went on an overly aggressive flagging spree and my flags no longer had any effect. Months later I sent an email to hn@ycombinator.com to pledge more judicious use of flagging and to request the restoration of that power. I got it back then.
How do you know that people use flags to further an agenda? I for one both downvote and flag pretty often, but it's largely because I don't like the tone of the discourse, not because of some overarching ploy.
Since it's such a powerful action, it would be nice if flaggers had to at least justify the flag. Is it breaking a site rule? Is it spam? Is it not the original source? Does it actually violate the rules, or are you just using "Flag" as a mega-downvote for articles you don't personally like?
Yeah, that's the 'receipts for everything' idea and if you think it through, you'll realize it's at a minimum impractical and more likely just an outright bad idea. Where are these 'reasons' going to go? Who is going to read them or act on them? It sort of wants to stick it to those bad flaggers and misinformed downvoters or whatever but think about it applied to you. Do you not recoil at being asked by some random web app to justify your actions? Like, we're ostensibly here for conversation not to fill out TPS report cover sheets.
This is 'drink verification can' but for messageboards.
A lot of HN mechanism makes more sense if you can accept the idea that the goal is to promote good threads, and not, as so many people believe, to promote one set of opinions over another. Requiring justification for flags would immediately crud up threads with meta-debates.
A hard thing for people to accept, something that I think is an unstated part of the HN ethos but nevertheless real, is that it's almost always better to have no thread at all than a shitty one. Important topics will inevitably get an airing in one thread or another.
Requiring justification for flags would immediately crud up threads with meta-debates.
That is true and I used to say it but the receipts people evade it with non-public receipts (which can maybe later somehow be audited). So I'm switching to dunking on the thing for its martinetism and pointless bureaucracy. It feels more self-indulgently righteous to boot!
> I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away.
Huh, I always thought it was the other way around. Anything negative about Musk also gets quickly flagged and buried. I guess we can agree that Musk is currently a lightning rod, and brigades on both sides are acting to hide (positive and negative) coverage of his actions.
Some valid threads will get flagged because the comment section will be extremely predictable flame wars and have nothing to do with the article. That's the nature of social media. People can't help themselves. There's plenty of other social media sites for that sort of sports team drumbeating, so not much is lost by flagging some news article off the frontpage.
I hope people don't get punished for flagging Musk appreciation content. There's a lot that can be wrong with such submissions (cultism, uncritical praise, excessive volume, lack of substance, etc.).
You can’t eliminate subjective judgement, but cultism isn’t electoral politics, it’s about loving and adoring the guru, feeling great about how smart the guru is etc.
You should supply links to whatever accounts you had that were banned, so readers can make up their own minds about what happened and how fair or unfair we were.
When someone makes claims about how they were unfairly treated, but won't let people look at the actual situation, that's sort of a tell. If the mods had actually treated them so badly, you can be sure that it would be pointed to with neon hypertext.
Here are a few shadowbanned users I saw in a /single/ thread (who don't know they're shadowbanned as they prolifically comment away), whose comments are pretty normie-tier:
(There seems to be extreme bias or unfair flagging by users simply because "old Texan" and "techright" are "scary Conservative-sounding usernames", yet you pursue the innocents being reported rather than the botfarms mass-flagging?)
It's all very "Everyone Stalin's sending to the gulags is a criminal, though, so keep your nose down and mind your own business." God sees everything, you know.
Right, so mods can claim it's my alt and ban me for ban evasion, while the buttkissers comb her history for anything too "techbro"-sounding to prove that she "had it coming". Not my first rodeo, Danny boy.
upvoted.. not because I agree, but because dissent has to be tolerated in a civil society.
I would like to see more discussion on HN around topics that seem unpopular here, and are perhaps politically divisive .. such as : economic inequality, climate change, demographic crunch
Somewhere between the prevailing economic malaise, cynicism and despair ... and tech-bro fan-boi greedy optimism : there might be a middle way where we can use the new technologies of AI to actually improve our lives and create wide wealth generation, and more prosperity for the middle class.
Thanks for replying; I had positive karma, now I have negative karma and am lucky I'm not shadowbanned yet. Whether you agree with the comments that got this user shadowbanned, do you agree with shadowbanning this user for these comments? Because it was only for these comments and nothing else.
I think it's great to see more moderation from non-Americans.
My biggest critique of this site is that the user base and moderation seems very biased with American perspectives to the detriment of the non-American user base and the quality of content as a whole.
Many thanks for the warm welcome, everyone.
It’s been a privilege to help support this community and to work alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years. It’s a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving community, and I’m continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts thought and energy into it.
One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the bait and switch is on…
Thank you for doing what you do! I'm sure it isn't easy keeping this place healthy and thriving, but me and so many others really appreciate the blood, sweat and probably a few literal tears it takes :)
Not to forget — of course — the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that must've went into cushioning the brain from the occasional nervekiller comment, as well as the endo-/perilymph for the overall "mental balance".
One more welcome from another Tom o/
Nice to hear someone else is looking at Arc now as well! Any chance we might see some issues on anarki resolved now? Perhaps https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/89 would be a good starting point :grin:
Jokes aside, its good to see YC cares about community, and looking forward to seeing your nick in the comments. Good luck
Indeed, from yet another Tom, glad you're doing what you're doing. HN is the best forum on the internet in no small part due to very active moderation efforts.
Hi, I'm just some young guy but i wanted to thank you for contributing to what makes this site great. It feels to me like this is one of the last bastions of the true news aggregator/comment media of old and i really appreciate everyone who dedicates time to maintaining it. Thanks <3
Thanks to you! We hope to keep the site great for people of all ages, but keeping it relevant for younger readers is something we particularly think about. You're most welcome to email us and tell us if you ever think of ways we can do better at this.
Welcome, Tom!
Thanks for your moderation work so far, and welcome as an official moderator. Glad you'll be helping Dang keeping this an awesome community.
Tom, what a small world. Seems just like yesterday we were at Inspire 9 together!
Hey Sam, we first met well before that :)
Welcome! And also I am so sorry
Best wishes! Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help.
Welcome tom, as a fellow moderator its not easy haha, I am sure its easier than Reddit.
Thanks in advance, Tom. Never a better time for more smart work in this area.
Thank you for taking up the mantle!
> One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the bait and switch is on…
I would love it if you could get the current HN code base into a state that it could be open sourced
I understand the desire to keep certain aspects “secret sauce” to prevent abuse, but surely that could be addressed with some kind of plugin mechanism and then just don’t open source those plugins
Congrats Tom!
All hail our new, most favourite overlord from the British Commonwealth on days ending in "y"!
I, for one, welcome our new overlord Tom.
Welcome, Tomho W
Welcome Tom!
Welcome!
Please rewrite HN as an SPA using the most bleeding edge alpha JavaScript frameworks you can find.
10MB page-weight SPA with the front page a 3 x 10 grid of image tile links coming soon. After all my background is in consumer travel and "desktop-like" business admin apps. I'm a natural for this.
The one thing that could improve HN is rendering fonts clientside on to a full screen Canvas element. Then all we need is a client-side framework for interpreting the element's pixels into HTML for screen reader support.
I dunno if you got the memo, but we're in 3rd of April now, no more jokes allowed, especially not traumatic ones like those.
Reminder for April Fools Day next Year: Get Dang to do a post saying HN is moving to a discord server.
That's not a prank, it's just evil!
Welcome! Good luck for a hard job.
Welcome Tom! I want to add to the chorus saying how excellent HN has been for so many years, in large part thanks to the excellent moderation. I dove into forums early on and they have always been one of the favorite and most treasured parts of the internet. It's not an exaggeration to say that HN is one of the best ever. The longevity is commendable, especially in an industry full of fads and flameouts.
Dang and Tom, please keep doing what you're doing.
Observation:
How lucky are we that our contributions here warrant two fine moderators?
I just read Tom's brief story on how he arrived here and what it means and felt... I don't really have a quick word for it.
I know I am better for having spent time here.
Oh, I got it! A tiny bit spoiled, but in the best of ways. Yeah, that is what I felt.
How lucky we are indeed. :)
Do you have showdead enabled to see how many good comments are being unfairly censored? Otherwise this is just survivorship bias talking.
I have! It's very rare that I see a comment being flagged unfairly. Sometimes it appears as unfair to me, but then I try to look from other angles in case it's just my bias.
Also, don't forget that it's mainly other users who flag, not moderators.
Also also, it's a bit ironic coming from a 3 months old account with already negative karma. I believe HN has a problem with users who create many new accounts and don't bother to understand "what is a good thoughtful comment" and change their behaviour.
If you see a good comment in the [dead] state, you don't have to complain about it being "unfairly censored" - you can intervene to fix it by vouching for it. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
That requires the user to reach the "small karma threshold". Difficult when the user you replied to has negative karma after several months of HN participation.
The threshold is 30 karma. Anyone can easily reach that if they want to use HN as intended.
I have had showdead enabled for years and I think I can count the number of dead comments that didn't deserve the status on one hand.
Same.
I turned it on very soon after I setup my account. My own personal tolerance for speech is less aggressive than what we see here on HN. I dislike completely inaccessible history, and basic accountability is why.
Works like the trash does. Want to see how people live? Pick through the trash.
I suspect that dang has been barely surviving the (e-)moderation-technology debt (Arc notwithstanding). Good to have a second, antipodal, guy take on the burden!
Not many.
Congratulations Tom!
Tom (and Fenn) had rockstar status back when I was involved in university CS+Entrepreneurship clubs in Melbourne around 2009/2010 (mostly led by fine students at UniMelb, but I was helping spread the word at Monash) because they were the first(maybe one of the first?) Aussies to be accepted by YC. They always generously gave their time and advice at these student events, even dropped by the SiliconBeach networking meets to share their experiences and turned out to be exceptionally kind human beings in person. Definitely the right choice for moding this community!
I remember those days (and your username) very fondly. Great to see you still here.
We were the first startup to be Australian-based then move to the U.S. for YC.
Omnisio was an all-Australian team from the year before us but they were already residing in the U.S.
The first ever Australian-originated co-founder of a YC-backed company was Jamie Cameron. He co-founded Virtualmin, a commercially-supported fork of Webmin for virtual hosting, which Jamie first released in 1997. It looks like Virtualmin is still active today, which is awesome.
It just so happens that Jamie and Fenn used to sit next to each other in the software development team at Pacific Internet in Melbourne, where we all worked in the early 00s. Jamie's brother, Michael Cameron, was a co-founder of Rome2Rio, which was based at Inspire9 along with us from about 2011-12, and became one of the most successful consumer travel startups out of Australia.
> He has been doing HN moderation work for years already and knows the site and its practices inside-out, so the only new thing you'll see is mod comments from Tom showing up in the threads the way mine do.
I wonder if there are any other secret moderators.
We're all secret moderators except you.
I thought we were all bots?
Both can be true.
This would have been an epic April 1st joke :)
If you reach 160'000 karma you can see the secret mods
was really hoping the threshold is 65,535 because I'm much more likely to reach it counting backwards.
At 1 million you become a secret mod. Or so I hear.
If you flag, downvote, and/or vouch comments, you're basically already a moderator-lite yourself :)
Upvoting posts has a moderation-like effect (opposed to that of downvoting).
I dunno, I feel like that'd be "curation" rather than "moderation".
There are many, I think? Dang has mentioned other moderators (plural) before, I believe.
In the classic tradition of thinking that “dang” is pronounced “dang” and not “Dan G.” I propose that we read “tomhow” as “Tomh Ow”.
Has Dan ever commented on whether the "dang" pronunciation was intentional? I too, was under the impression he just liked the twanginess of the word.
I have people call me Joenot - in reality, this username was chosen decades ago by my mother, pairing Joe (my name) and Not(tawa) - my tiny hometown.
Sometimes I wish I'd chosen better but like many names, once it's out there, it tends to stick.
If you torture it a bit, you can make it "tomorrow" said with a weird accent. To mh ow
That is exactly what my brain auto completed it into when I read the headline
So, like if you were from Boston?
Towhom it may concern,
I prefer the dyslexic pronunciation of towhom.
> dang” is pronounced “dang” and not “Dan G.”
WAIT WHAT?!?
I just assumed his name was actually "Dang" like he was Vietnamese or something.
same. and when I learned it was Dan G I didn't accept it entirely. now it's a sort of superposition of them - and mostly a nebulous entity that maintains civil discourse - like something from a Miyazaki movie
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35463012
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35463012
How comes your karma points halved?
That is natural canadon decay. Think uranium slowly turning into lead, that sort of thing.
Karma is stored in a 16 bit integer. It overflowed.
That's cool
I too realized this only like a year ago.
I think tom(a)how would work too.
"To mhow"
Pronounced exactly as "to meow"
Welcome, Tom! Y'all are making HN a place that I still love to visit every day. I find it awesome how dang et al. not only manage to keep spammers and trolls in check but also actively improve discussions by merging threads and asking people to behave.
Would it be possible to give him a new username for this role like “darn”?
Then we can continue confusing the beginnings of comments that appeal to authority as interjections.
Yes, and then the next two mods could be "heck" and "gosh"! Maybe "dadgummit" if the powers-that-be are feeling spicy. :-)
That's a great introduction and a great opening from Tom. HN gets a second public moderator is a good sign. You would have to be crazy to agree to this but I guess brave, too!
It's always a site that's had dinner party vibes even tho it's so big. Weird! But the focus on curiosity and healthy is important.
I'm sure the features of HN are already extremely well thought out and precisely balanced, but I guess this is as good a time as any to throw out a feature idea: you know how you can favorite stories and comments? I want to favorite users, too. Maybe privately. Because it's like a bookmark thing where I can come back and see what interesting ones are doing. Just makes sense to internalize it as a list rather than externalize it into a browser bookmark list, I think. But then again, maybe a private list or yet another list would be too much!
Welcome, Tom! Sometimes I can't believe how good we have it here. Thank you both very much.
Sincere thanks to you too, Scott.
Welcome, and thanks for striving to keep hn the bastion of intellectual curiosity that it's been in the ~9 years since I joined. I get tremendous value out of this website, and I'm very grateful for the effort you all are putting in to keep it stable.
Congrats Tom!
Thanks dang and other mods for protecting this sacred corner of the web for so long. You're the guardians of the best no-BS tech news community. It is truly an under-appreciated effort.
Best wishes.
I've (mostly quietly) enjoyed the "vibe" of HN for well over a decade now. It's certainly a major contribution to maintaining enjoyment in the crazy world of tech. Thank you for your contributions to this community which remains so special to an entire industry.
Welcome, Tom! Thanks for supporting this community for so long. Your work is much appreciated!
> He's still kind and thoughtful, but he's going to post as tomhow from now on
I laughed at this phrasing. Welcome tomhow!
Great! Look forward to not noticing anything in particular changing around here. Seriously appreciate this site.
I always wondered how HN manages to do moderation 24/7 around the clock. Australia makes sense.
A lot of it boils down on dang being oversubscribed. And having some automations to help him
What do you mean by “oversubscribed”?
Automation, sure. But people need to sleep sometime, and maybe also have some life outside HN, for mental health. ;)
I think what comment OP is saying is that dang was working more than was healthy - “oversubscribed” meaning “subscribed above capacity,” i.e. “doing yeoman’s work,” “doing the work of two people,” “that man is like a machine,” “do you ever sleep, dude?” etc
Welcome Tom! And thanks Dang for tirelessly looking after the community. HN is one of the last few sane places on the internet :)
How does such a large famous forum get by with 1 computer and 2 mods. Theres no spam here. No fighting. How odd for the internet in 2025 XD
No images. No reposting. No (public) popularity contest stats. A general vibe against politics posting. There's just not much here to attract the worst kinds of behavior.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
May we please have another mod based within GMT to round out this follow-the-sun pattern that's slowly rising
Welcome!! I was worried for a second that you were the Fallout Tom Howard, lol.
I'm not sure if I should say "welcome" or "congrats" so maybe a little of both!
Moderation is a huge part of what makes HN so valuable, so it's good to hear dang is getting some much needed help as this place apparently won't stop growing
"Well, grats!"
Thanks Tom your work is appreciated and I'm sure will be appreciated going forward. There's a whole lot of us here who really value this place, and the many fine minds who share time with us in it, and you're a big part of that.
Thanks for the work you guys do, Dan and Tom, to keep this place a good and intellectually stimulating place for discussion. We appreciate you.
Congrats Tom. I wonder if a particular model could be used as a baseline for these values or if they are already doing that to check first level prior to a human in the loop? I myself have been using AI for this purpose and have found it getting pretty good. I know its not a replacement for thoughtful moderation however, a tailored model for HN would also promote the tradition of HN in terms of having it not just be about who is there and have it more trained on its best practices to promote consistency, possibly as an aid.
Congratulations Tom. Great to see the antipodes represented on the HN team :)
Welcome aboard Tom. Thanks to the efforts of dang HN has become an incredible community. I've learned a lot on here and made some great friends.
Congrats Tom. Fellow aussie HN lover here. Keep up the good work.
Welcome Tom! I have been visiting this site (almost) daily for 17.5 years now thanks to the wonderful technical community and diligent behind-the-scenes moderation.
>I'm not going anywhere, so you'll have two of us to put up with going forward :)
I thought that sctb was another one? No longer I guess?
Alas, not for a few years. He is greatly missed.
I want to say Welcome but Tom has been on HN for so long.
I want to say Congrats but moderating HN must have been a painful job.
So I guess enjoy, have fun and see you around. :)
Congrats, Tom! I’m glad to hear there’s more than one moderator here so you can share the workload and hopefully relax well on your time off.
Welcome Tom! Thanks for helping to make this the highest signal-to-noise ratio forum in the general technology/business space.
Welcome Tom!
Thanks (in arrears and advance) for all the work here; this is the best forum on the Internet, and we owe much of it to you guys.
Congrats Tom! And thanks Dan! (Yes, I've been around long enough to know the "G" is for your last name! :)
I feel like it's a little unfair when it's coming from "eddyg".
This better not have any impacts on my capacity for mischief and shenanigans...
Anywho, welcome tomhow.
While tomhow is of course welcome, I want to express gratitude to dang for years of quite fair moderation. I've been around multiple communities and he's nothing like those power-tripping libera.chat or reddit moderators.
Congrats and welcome to the new public status! Forgive the non-substantive comment but that's awesome :-)
Welcome Tom! Wishing you good luck from this former Reddit mod -- I know how hard the job can be!
Right on! Thanks and good luck and please keep the ethos / vibe going the way it improbably has for all these years. I've been active online since about 1998, and HN remains unique in my experience. Kudos as always to dang for the huge role he's played in that.
Welcome tom!
I'm long time lurker on hn. Excited to see you as mod.
Welcome and courage tomhow.
Hi, I'm excited. I'm really wondering if you'll do such an excellent job like dang is doing. This is a really special community, and now it's in your hands as well.
One thing that I appreciate about dang, and PG before him, is their intellectual honesty and strong sense of ethics.
On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.
But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition, its been capable of unreasonable greatness and real authenticity.
At this point, HN is sort of the tail that wags the YC dog. There are a great many seed funds but only one HN.
It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.
Good luck and thanks!
> On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.
I think it's at least as plausible that this is part of the magic that makes it good. HN is sufficiently "on the margin" that they don't have to do things like placate advertisers with their moderation policies. The mods like dang, tomhow and pg mostly care about HN as users rather than owners.
> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term.
That sounds good in theory... in practice it might be the beginning of the end. Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a mission of its own. Although I'm actually not sure of the legal status of HN right now, maybe it's already something like that.
> I think it's at least as plausible that this is part of the magic that makes it good. HN is sufficiently "on the margin" that they don't have to do things like placate advertisers with their moderation policies. The mods like dang, tomhow and pg mostly care about HN as users rather than owners.
I agreed, and would say its stronger than that. Running HN well is great for Y Combinators reputation, and its focused on a relevant audience. I am sure that has to be very good for them.
> Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a mission of its own.
Absolutely. It happens a lot.
Over the years I've become quite jaded on non-profits personally. As they tend to appeal to the people who want to pursue an ideology rather than follow the goals of the non-profit. Which usually are at odds.
Before even the "has a mission of its own" part, an independent non-profit needs to pay its bills. I suspect that dang & Co. aren't working for free. Similar for servers & internet connections & etc.
And I'd bet that few people here want to see ads, or start paying for their accounts.
It seems a lot like the Emperor Joseph II - Mozart situation or countless others like it through history. You could ask Mozart to start a nonprofit, find customers etc. but it sure is convenient when there is a Joseph II around who appreciates the arts.
I hope dang and tomhow get rich doing this job. I'd happily pay for HN too.
People here see ads regularly which is how hn pays the bills. YC hiring posts and company launches are all paid ads in the sense that being allowed to post them is why YC funds hn.
I imagine 90% of users here would just block any ads anyways.
> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it...
I was there since around 2015 and the evolution of that forum and its population/opinion has been very interesting, to say to put it mildly...
Remember when the biggest disagreements were about ORM & Frameworks? I miss those days. I didnt even mind the discussion about the ethics of Uber or Airbnb, but now, now it is different, & not for the better.
I've been here since around that time and to be honest, I haven't noticed much of a change for the worse. The world around us has changed, political life may have gotten slightly more complex, but the community feels just as friendly, curious and insightful.
Yea same for me. Nothing much has changed here. I guess it used to be a bit more technical? But just a bit (I miss the Dolphin emulator status updates - they got me hooked on the technical content posted on this site)
The whole western world is different and not for the better since 2015. Erosion of public trust since then is tremendous and regrettable so it is not surprising that we miss the communities that once were.
So been here slightly longer and the only shift I can recall is a shift away from business to tech.
Early days had a lot more discussion about the business side of startups and vc. Then it started shifting more towards tech too the point now where startup/business discussion is mostly limited to Show/Ask posts.
The loss of chatter around the soft skills around tech (so business but also UI/UX design, design patterns, organizational approaches (like holocracy), planning processes, etc) has made HN a lot less interesting IMO. If I just wanted the usual tinfoil hat FOSS BOFH content, then I can go literally anywhere else. Reddit, Matrix, IRC, Telegram, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, they're all full of it.
Then there's the widening of scope to big social issues that's a different matter altogether.
Is this because many of the soft skills you mention were in flux/being 'disrupted' 15 years ago and since then they've become the accepted norm? I enjoyed that content too but feel like it was a time where startups were changing the face of how companies operated and now most businesses follow those models and they're not yet ripe for change again.
I honestly don't know. On the one hand you're right, we were in a time when startups were doing things like experimenting with holocracy. On the other hand, companies and cooperatives are still today experimenting with more efficient, equitable ways to get things done. I feel quite disappointed that so much of the anger over inequality in this community gets aimed at US or international politics rather than discussing things like corporate or cooperative structures which is both more grounded and more easy for many of us as practitioners to action.
To me it feels more emotional catharsis than intellectual discussion; getting mad at politics is getting mad at something you can't control and so is more of a way to air out your emotions. Getting mad at corporate structure or envisioning a cooperative is something we can control and requires more rigor to engage with.
I guess we've had a massive change in terms of remote and hybrid work practices in the past few years. Sadly even those discussions become political or angry rather than good discussions of the pros, cons, and alternatives.
Been here since 2011 and reading for a few years longer than that. I don't think the site has changed, more that the world has changed (a lot). There isn't that general excitement around consumer tech and programming that there was 15-20 years ago. We've gone from talking about how we need to start teaching coding in schools to how we shouldn't bother because AI will be doing it anyway.
The fun has been sucked out of it all. It wasn't all that long ago that we were excited by simple but fun devices like the iPad Nano and Flip camera. Now we all have phones that can shoot Hollywood films, we can access all art every created on them, and we have watches that can save our lives...and we've got a bit too used to it.
On top of that around here we used to get excited about scrappy startups raising funding and trying to change the world. Unfortunately because a number of those companies went on to dominate the world in negative ways, exploit users and hoard wealth, people have become jaded and scrappy startups are less exciting because we assume they'll eventually do something loathsome 10 years from now.
I'd love more framework debates, excitement, and creativity - but until the wider world is happy and positive again I'm not going to hold my breath.
I think HN has been gradually losing what makes it unique. The net is filled with BOFH-style pro-FOSS tinfoil hat tech content and has been since the early '90s. The joke among my college cohort about Slashdot was that IT Helpdesk 1 will have strong opinions on how MSFT execs were engaged in crazy conspiracies. You can find that kind of content anywhere that tech people talk. HN's value proposition for me has always been informed commentary; industry insiders, academics, and practitioners weighing in based on their domain expertise. Today's HN feels a lot more like a rumor mill for random people interested in tech. Along with this shift has been a widening of scope where we don't just talk about tech but also general politics. In general, HN has been gradually trending to be just another big tech subreddit.
These days HN reminds me a lot of Reddit r/programming in the early 2010s. To me this isn't a good thing because I used to come to HN to specifically get informed commentary. But there's no way for a site as big as HN to be dominated by informed content anymore because there just aren't that many people working on interesting tech in the world. So I do what most others do I suspect which is talk with friends from my alma mater and old jobs in group chats and share HN links and laugh at the unhinged, uninformed comments.
I do think at this point HN has changed its appeal. I feel that people today are attracted to HN because of its raucous, rumor-mill feel rather than informed commentary.
I really don't think that HN lets dissenting opinions thrive (well, not anything that is truly controversial but not clearly hateful). That may feel cozy but it's not a reflection of anything pure or good, imo.
My experience is that HN's Overton window is probably on average 15-20% larger than most forums. That's not uniform across all topics though. So if you skew toward a particular set of topics it may feel like a typical forum, or even in some ways more constrained.
My feeling is it also depends on weekday vs. weekend, and on the time of day (or night).
My issue is it seems like something has to only be a bit controversial to be completely hidden from everyone. There was the recent DF article about how Gruber thinks his articles are being artificially shitlisted and I can't help but agree? I don't necessarily think the mods have their fingers on the scale, but I wouldn't be surprised if the algorithm works in a way where if enough people flag something it gets automatically hidden, and there's enough people who see DF and automatically flag it that those blog posts get hidden every time.
That site had 11 major frontpage threads in the last year, which is a lot.
Every single one of them set off the flamewar detector. That's extremely unusual. If it were one or two I'd call it random, but 11 in a row, whatever the reason, is not random. We turned off that software penalty on about half of those threads.
In his article https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i... he mentions several times that he is aiming for "comment traction," treating articles with more comments than upvotes as successful while complaining that recently there haven't been as many comments.
It does make sense that DaringFireball would consider starting a flamewar a job well done, but of course HN is optimizing for the opposite.
HN's "flamewar detector" (I prefer "spiciness indicator") is one of those tools I'd been highly skeptical of, and still have significant issues with, but ... it does in fact work much of the time. It's where it doesn't work that the problems really manifest.
I'd come to that conclusion after scraping all "past" front pages from 2006 through May-ish 2023 and doing a number of analyses of that corpus. (I've commented on that a few times here on HN and on the Fediverse.)
One of the absolute spiciest discussions ever was a pg post about HN itself. Which suggests that when a topic of of direct interest and familiarity, people will tend to hop on it. There are also a great many flame-y threads, though note that by virtue of making the front page, my sample probably skews to less disastrous threads with the absolute sh*tshows being well below the top-30 fold.
Among other weaknesses, spiciness doesn't distinguish between pure troll/clickbait threads, and those on which there's a significant and justified spread of opinion. As such, the metric makes hard discussions even harder to have, though mods can and do turn off the penalty on request (often many hours after the discussion's started, for obvious reasons, which is its own penalty). I do wish that HN could have those discussions, and I've thought and written (both on HN and in emails to mods) about what that might entail. I'm coming to the long-delayed and somewhat regrettable conclusion that it's not the right tool for that particular job.
Or - he's critical of SV and large tech companies?
HN is replete with criticism of these things.
He's known as an advocate for and analyst of (sometimes critically, often less so) one of the biggest, richest technology companies in the world. That's his whole gig.
I follow the HN subreddit and routinely see very active threads that aren’t in the feed.
Strong disagree here... While there are definitely those that will bury some opinions with downvotes, there are others that will upvote. Conservative, Libertarian, Progressive, Liberal and even outright Communist views get expressed in varying comments and that's just political leanings.
I only really recognize this because I'll be actively reading/replying sometimes and see comments go +/- 2-3 up or down votes back and forth on the same comment. While you may be at say -2, that's just the aggregate. I sometimes wish I could see the total up/down votes just out of curiosity.
Then you're not spending enough time reading the comments on controversial stories. Disagreement is alive and well on HN.
I disagree. People will frequently say that downvoting is not for disagreeing, but in every controversial thread dissenting opinions are quickly downvoted and frequently flagged. Some recover, but many die or end up pushed down into obscurity.
Mildly controversial opinions sometimes survive and get discussion, but anything past that rarely get a reply and just get downvoted and flagged into oblivion. This isn't exactly a slight against HN, as this happens basically everywhere past a tiny userbase community. But I don't think it's particularly right to put HN on a pedestal for its ability to handle controversy.
I would also argue that shutting certain posts down early is what helps it thrive. Maybe you lose some value of topic but you gain the ability to discuss other things in depth. You also prevent pollution of discourse.
There are over 1,200 comments on this controversial story alone, with plenty of debate within: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43517833
What more evidence do you need that spirited disagreement is alive and well here?
That seems like a pretty mild controversy to me. How many people could even say whether their water has added fluoride?
What kind of evidence would satisfy you, then?
I have `showdead` enabled. It should not be the case that I find flagged posts that are good -- that are well written, don't break rules, etc -- but are flagged (presumably) due to expressing a dissenting view.
That ‘presumably’ is doing a lot of lifting and would be better supported by some examples of such posts.
That's fair from your perspective -- although the parent's question is what would subjectively satisfy me. I don't keep a log of such instances, and I don't see a way to view my vouched posts, but it is something I observe often enough.
Sure, but the reason that question is being raised is so that we can decide for ourselves how good your evidence is - both conceptually and concretely. It certainly doesn't mean you have to share it but it makes the discussion actually meaningful.
Your vouched items should be visible to you at https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=dooglius
Does that link only show vouched items of some recency? The page is literally blank (minus header and footer) for me, but it's probably been a week or so since I vouched a comment.
edit: sorry, I missed the sibling comment to this. I only ever come across dead comments, not posts. So I needed to add &kind=comment to see vouched comments.
Ah, I meant comments rather than posts (and I think flagging posts has a different meaning since one cannot downvote posts) but it looks like comments are visible by adding `&kind=comment`. Anyway, the most recent comment I vouched is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43530295 which I think is a good example of what I'm talking about.
You can vouch it, and if the comment is still [dead] but it's really good you can send an email to dang and tomhow hn@ycombinator.com Remember to include a link to the comment, and use it sparsely because it's a manual processes.
Like the parent commenter, I frequently see high quality posts via showdead. I vouch them, but I've never seen one resurrected soon after. I rarely remember to go back and check hours later, but by then the thread has died down anyway.
It takes a few vouches to unkill a comment. (The exact number is a mystery (I don't remember dang telling the number ever) and it may change from time to time (or not).)
For not-bad comments just vouch them, but for very-good-I-will-not-be-able-to-sleep-until-it-is-unkilled comments vouch and send an email.
Downvoting for disagreement has always been fine on HN. People sometimes assume otherwise because they're implicitly porting the rules from a larger site, but that's a mistake.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
It has but I'm not sure this works at the scale HN operates at now. When the community was smaller, the band of opinion was narrower, so the downvote worked better. Now that the community is large I'm not sure if this scales well. Just a thought I've had over the last few years.
Wouldn't that only be true if the vote thresholds are absolute? If the impact of a vote is adjusted based on voters present, it should scale.
> People will frequently say that downvoting is not for disagreeing
Those people are wrong.
Downvoting pushes peoples comments down and greys them out, effectively silencing them. It creates echo chambers.
I reserve my downvotes for when arguments are made in bad faith, rely on logical fallacies, or present know-false information as an argument.
If someone presents an argument on something I disagree with, but it's made in good faith and is well-structured, it deserves an upvote, even if I still disagree afterwards.
Your very comment is now downvoted but not silenced. We all see it, as we do every grey comment, as long as one works their way down the comments page. Not every comment is going to be agreed with and rise above the fold, and that’s ok.
So you understand how echo chambers are created and are fine with it?
The problem is that there is no one with power here that can come to the "little guy's" defence. There is no will around here for that kind of support, because the only people hired to wield such power are of like mind. DJT doesn't hire democrats, and this is no different.
Look at this comment section, and tell me this isn't an echo chamber.
I don’t understand what your response has to do with what I said. Differing opinions are welcome here—particularly if they are eloquently expressed and factually supported—but that doesn’t mean they will be popular. That’s just life. Opinions, like most things, follow a normal distribution.
> Not every comment is going to be agreed with and rise above the fold, and that’s ok.
> That's just life.
Life is the result of what we choose, alone and in our groups, and groupthink creates a momentum that is hard to understand from within the group.
Only compassion gives us a clear and accurate perspective on life, my friend.
And that's a fact, and its not being a factor in this site's m.o. is precisely why it is the way it is, why it is staffed by whom it's staffed by, and why its founder has the Twitter profile picture he does and why he rails against DEI.
It's also why your opinions are so valued here, and why you don't understand what I said.
Perhaps you won't be so privleged some day and then you will begin to really understand what life is really about.
Without such a gift from life, you will most likely just continue to think you understand, while asking far fewer questions than you should.
What role does compassion play in your life? That is the most genius question you can ever ask yourself, and is really the only one worth either asking or answering.
That fact is never accepted as truth by those who already "know it all". Such is the way of "facts". Unless your knowledge base is founded upon compassion, nothing truly eloquent will be perceived as such. Such is human life, my friend. All the rest is just mammalian, when it comes to human beings in their groups.
Is your group founded on compassion? That you don't value it does not mean it is not the most valuable concept in the universe.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
>> Disagreement is alive and well on HN.
> I disagree.
Head explodes
I had a whole paragraph that I removed that was to preempt this reply, but I thought it wasn't needed.
Is that a moderation issue? Because to me that's more of a system / culture issue.
You can't argue in people's stead. If most dissenting commentary is hurtful, inciteful, manipulative, generally demagogue, etc., it's going to get culled, and you get a situation where "dissent isn't thriving".
Moderation drives culture and should in the very least offset the worst tendencies of culture.
Otherwise, what exactly is moderation for?
Moderation does participate in the culture of course, but I disagree that it would drive it necessarily. You can only do so much by reminding people to align with the posting guidelines and removing ill fitting posts and individuals.
This place would look like 4chan if it wasn't for the moderation.
Moderation absolutely drives the culture, by setting a tone that drives away certain users while attracting others.
In other words what ever issues a site has are inherently due to moderation whether it be a choice on the part the moderators or a lack of resources to moderate as they would like to.
I don't think we're actually disagreeing. Yes, moderation is key, but ultimately people post the content. As you say, it's a matter of attraction. But if the target group of attraction is empty, there's no amount of moderation that can help that.
I think it’s a tough balance because you want discussion but certain topics have diminishing returns.
I'm not sure about that, but a lot of it depends on what you consider to be "dissenting opinions".
For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.
Personally I hope Tom will bring new moderation policies that will truly let unpopular opinions thrive, but I don't have high hopes here since this is just an announcement of a new moderator, not an announcement of new moderation policies.
"Not thriv[ing]" is not the same as being quashed. Minority opinions don't always rise to the popularity or acceptance level of majority opinions, and that's OK.
Let us not use the word "thrive" or "quash" to avoid misunderstandings. To rephrase, I hope that on HN even minority opinions have reasonable rebuttals. Unfortunately what currently happens is people flag minority opinions with no discussion.
"flag" and "downvote" are two different tools with two different purposes.
"downvote" seems more appropriate for for "this is not interesting and should be less prominent".
"flag" seems more appropriate for "this should not be here at all".
By way of an example, on a political story, if you say something merely unpopular, you'll get downvotes and replies; if you say something hateful, you'll (usually) get flagged.
I agree with you, but that's not what happens for polarizing topics that are technical in nature and not political. People on HN seem to flag comments rather than downvote them.
I agree that that's not a best practice. It's not what the downvote mechanism was intended for.
In a way, iirc, it really is. It's as much a "I disagree" as it is "I don't like this". That said, I would like to see more people actually respond in addition to a downvote.
I don't think that's generally a function of the moderators though.
Flagging is used by people who have no rebuttal but are mad.
That's why I have only flagged one or two posts, ever, but not because I was mad, but because the comment was just plain beyond the pale.
And my posts against portaying violent rape in film got flagged.
Make it make sense, because I understand the failure of this system because systems are my trade-in-craft.
Nope, sometimes I would have a rebuttal but flagging is the better option (constructive discussion is hard without mutual respect, and/or don't feed the troll). Or, the comment doesn't even have anything to refute, it's just disrespectful or it's spam, or both.
I have flagged a few comments but I'm rarely mad.
And if one is mad because of a disrespectful comment, the flagging is probably appropriate too.
> constructive discussion is hard without mutual respect
Yes, indeed.
> Flagging is used by people who have no rebuttal but are mad
This is cope, just like "I'm being downvoted for speaking the truth!". Nobody thinks "wow, they said a true statement, I should downvote them".
I suggest you try to steelman the idea of flagging and see that maybe there could be other things at play.
> Nobody thinks "wow, they said a true statement, I should downvote them".
Precisely. That's the biggest problem with closed-minded fools.
> For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.
There is a difference between expressing unpopular opinions (e.g. "manifest V3 is good"), which receive an appropriate level of considered disagreement; and expressing opinions that are removed administratively.
In my experience, the former is quite common, while the latter only occurs in cases of hateful or off-topic comments. That is as it should be. No one is obligated to agree with you, and that fact should not dissuade you from expressing yourself.
I’m a fairly steadfast holder of the “I like apples walled garden, it’s my choice to be there” argument, and I think as a dissenting opinion on this forum I get a lot of flak for it. But that’s not a moderation problem, it’s the fact that my opinion is different and I have 10x the number of people disagreeing with me than agreeing with me.
Upvoted, but your opinion is wrong and I didn't want to leave without telling you I hate your opinion.
> having the opinion
What I see a lot of is this:
User posts "$opinion $generalization $snark $dismissal $adhominem".
User gets down voted or flagged. User complains that downvotes are for expressing $opinion and that $opinion is not allowed on this site!
But we can all see the other things in their post that probably brought on most of the downvotes.
I agree. "It's not what you said, it's how you said it.".
Most stuff I downvote is because of the way it's expressed, not because of the opinion itself.
> For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.
That's not a moderation issue. You can post that opinion, and people will disagree with it, post responses to it, and downvote it. It will not be flagged out of existence, unless it's also violating site policy in other ways.
As someone who actively believes Manifest V3 is good for users, I second this: my opinion is not suppressed by this forum. It's simply unpopular among nerds, the population to whom this forum is aimed.
A polite well worded post that disagrees with the mainstream will indeed still exist, but it will be moderated to unreadably transparent and hidden by default. It’s not a great experience.
Meanwhile personal attacks and hyperbole regarding Elon Musk and Trump have become very common on HN.
> A polite well worded post that disagrees with the mainstream will indeed still exist, but it will be moderated to unreadably transparent and hidden by default. It’s not a great experience.
Speaking from personal experience only: I have mostly not observed "polite, well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream" get downvoted to oblivion, unless some other factor also applies, such as that they're also things that seem likely to lead to a rehashed old-as-the-hills disagreement with no new information that will not on balance change any minds.
If you post (by way of example only, please observe the use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads are good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive pile of downvotes, I think that's a reasonable signal that the community isn't interested in seeing iteration 47,902 of that argument, and has no expectation that anything new will come out of that argument. If you have something new to say on that topic that is likely to lead into new and interesting arguments, at this point you would need to signpost that heavily, prefacing it with some equivalent of "Please note that I'm aware this is an age-old argument, but I think I have a new point to make that is worth considering", and then actually make a new point, at which point I think you're less likely to get downvoted to oblivion.
Personally, I don't downvote "mere" disagreement. I downvote (among other things) what seems to me to be uninteresting or thoughtless or insufficiently diligent disagreement, or factually incorrect information, or anything that seems like a discussion that spawned from it will not be interesting.
Now, that said, another factor here is that some people posting on political topics in particular believe they're making "polite well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream", and others do not share that belief and flag it to oblivion. For example, posts expressing bigotry mostly get flagged, no matter how surface-level "polite" they are.
> If you post (by way of example only, please observe the use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads are good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive pile of downvotes...
Sure, I imagine the grandparent poster means arguing something like "limiting access for extensons is good because they're often used to steal financial assets". Old extensions are sold, or cracked and updated to inclue malware.
I want to avoid letting a meta-level conversation slip into object-level. But using the object-level as an example, I would expect a comment that acknowledges the types of things that are hard to build with Manifest V3, particularly more advanced adblocking, and acknowledges that there need to be solutions for those things, and makes the point that letting extensions be all-powerful does lead to problems and that also needs solving, would not get downvoted to oblivion. That's much more nuanced than, for instance, suggesting that Manifest V3 is an unalloyed good with zero problems, which I would expect to get downvoted.
> acknowledges that there need to be solutions for those things
Why is this required, in order not for the comment to be downvoted to oblivion? You may be confusing bias with nuance.
I'm giving an example, which to some degree was meant as an existence proof of a way to support an unpopular position without getting massive downvotes. "X is entirely good with no problems whatsoever" being replaced by "I think the benefits of X outweigh the costs, and here's some acknowledgement of the costs". I'm not trying to suggest only one possible way to do that, or only one pattern to follow. (This is one danger of using an object-level example.)
OK. Yes I agree there’s a cost to anything and acknowledging that is important.
Downvoting and flagging is not moderation.
Flagging does seem to primarily be a tool for moderation. But for comments, at least, I've mostly not observed flagging being used to hide things that shouldn't be; if anything, I think flagging is underused on comments.
(It's still regularly abused on stories as a downvote, perhaps in part because stories don't have downvotes. HN sometimes "rescues" stories that get over-flagged, but it's still a problem.)
Flagging isn’t done by moderators, it’s done by regular HN users.
I didn't say it was done by moderators, I said it was a tool for moderation. Flagging is the means by which regular HN users perform moderation activities, in addition to the actions available to the moderators.
Ok, I see. I understood “moderation policies” upthread to refer to what guides the actions of the moderators.
Fair enough, I can see from the thread how that interpretation could arise. I would definitely interpret "moderation policy" to be policy implemented by moderators. In this case, I was responding to the statement that "flagging is not moderation", and I thought it was useful to distinguish that flagging semantically is a kind of moderation (done by users rather than by moderators).
For me the difference is that moderation by moderators is (usually) guided by some content policy, and one can disagree about the biases of the specific content policy, or disagree about applying a content policy based on topics and themes at all (as opposed to based on mere style and civility). With user actions, there is no predefined content policy, it’s just how the set of users who happen to read the specific thread or comment happen to feel.
Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading. But I also think that active moderation and crowd-sourced ranking mechanics are two different things.
> Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading.
I think that's a very different kind of forum, and it needs different tools to be usable, and it more quickly fails into unusability.
It’s how old-style forums work, and I’m still on a couple of them. It functions quite well with the right moderation.
It can work, but I think it's harder to scale to something the size of HN without losing some of the important properties HN has.
For example, I think it's useful that on balance the top few comments and their discussion are likely to be interesting, and the last few comments are unlikely to be interesting.
I agree it depends on the definition. Quite honestly my vibe, and really that is all it is for any of us discussing this, is pretty much anything more aggressive than my comment above (or even including my comment above, once more people read it).
I definitely DO NOT mean clear hate speech, etc.. that's not my point at all.
I, for one, come here in substantial part for the norms against aggression and toward calm substantive discussion.
Shouting matches and rhetorical posturing are exhausting. There are places for that—most places online, anymore; this is not one of them.
So, do you mean you don't like tone policing? You can say pretty much anything as long as the tone stays intellectual and doesn't go into brain damage politics, harassment, or conspiracy zone where it's being banned because it's off-topic and, frankly, exhausting and unproductive.
No, and if you read the tone of my posts and even the tone of dang (and others) here I would argue that my tone is not out of line and arguably more polite.
But I'm the one that is rate limited in this thread and prevented from interacting with people politely.
On the one hand, I think it's a bit unfair that this comment is currently downvoted as it's discussing moderation on a topic about moderation, so very much on-topic in this particular submission.
On the other hand, I think it needs to be more specific in order to be valuable feedback. Which dissenting opinions? Can you provide specific examples of comments you think got unreasonably flagged?
There's been an uptick in political posts which are off-topic per the guidelines, so an uptick in the absolute number of flagged submissions would just mean the community is properly enforcing the guidelines, which is good. However, as a consequence of that uptick in political submissions and flagging, there's also an uptick in the number of users complaining a post is unjustly flagged, because they incorrectly conflate enforcing the guidelines with political opinion, and that is not good.
I think a lot of users are tired of this back and forth, so my guess is they are reading between the lines of what you said (since you didn't provide specifics) and filling in the blank with what _they_ think you mean about undeserved flagging, with the topic of politics being top of mind at the moment. This shows that being specific helps both by providing actionable feedback while also increasing clarity, which is your responsibility as a communicator.
My understanding is that flagging does not imply moderation. When enough people flag a comment, it becomes dead automatically. There is, separately, the case that a moderator “kills” an unacceptable comment, but then it only appears as [dead] I believe (unless it was also being flagged by people). Someone correct me if this is wrong.
Moderation by the community is still moderation.
Well, you can call it that, but there is not a singular will or policy behind what is getting flagged, and the HN “community” isn’t homogeneous. HN users can also “vouch” to counteract flagging. It only takes a single vouch to un-kill a comment.
The value of "enough" is a moderation decision made by a human.
It’s not a decision made per individual submission or comment, I think. Of course, the specific automated mechanism exists because some human decided to implement it. My point is, in the case of the flagging mechanism, it’s not the moderators who are deciding based on the contents of the submission or comment.
Little ironic considering you're the second comment everyone sees on this thread at the moment.
A sample size of one doesn't really tell you anything in this context. HN definitely has a pretty heavy bias in some directions, it's mostly that the crowd that naturally flocks here tends to mostly agree on those topics, so you don't see conflict too often.
I feel like I often get into protracted discussions here in which I am defending a minority view, but I don't feel discouraged from doing so.
A huge part of that is that the tone is almost always civil and the arguments are typically in good faith.
Well, let's see how that plays out first, I did just post it a few minutes ago (refresh has me at 0 karma fyi)
It is a shame that people will downvote a thing that is expressing an honest opinion.
I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.
I don't think this extends to the way that HN is moderated or run. It is worth looking at dang's posts every now and again to take in the job that he does and how patient he can be, even with antagonism aimed directly at HN or himself personally.
From time to time I also have a look at the histories of some of those antagonistic people. Frequently there are signs that their behaviour was not always like this. Recent posts might be outright abusive and sound like the postings of angry teenagers. A few years earlier they might have been posting reasonable discussions on their thesis topic or tutorials on some useful subjects. Keeping that in mind helps you realise that these are real people and there may be other things going on in their life.
I think there are some good things to learn from people who work with addicts. You can simultaneously challenge bad behaviour and be compassionate to the person who committed it. Similarly, this is why I'm not a fan of cancelling people or holding them forever accountable for past bad behaviour. If they recognise that their behaviour was bad and are endeavouring to not be that way again, I don't think permanent ostracism benefits anyone. If anything it restricts people to a community that amplifies their negative behaviour.
I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.
That's a valid use of the button by design, HN is literally made to allow for that use. Plus it mimics real life interactions - there is a social cost/friction to saying things people disagree with or think are outright wrong. Most online chitchat places deteriorate because they remove such social frictions.
I would say it mimics real life interactions of some communities. I do not think that is universal. I tend to think that the communities, in real life and online, that permit civil discussion of dissenting opinions are the healthier ones.
I think there is a far greater real life social cost in violating standards of behaviour, such as aggressive engagement, or acting without empathy. I would argue that it is those influences that can be lacking in online discussions that cause them to deteriorate. There is also a lower barrier of entry for joining an online community than joining a real life community. A few dedicated but detrimental people can always evade safeguards and pollute a community to some degree, online communities being larger provide the possibility to each individual to do more damage, while also increasing the chances of there being individuals that would do so.
I would say it mimics real life interactions of some communities. I do not think that is universal.
I would say this is straight up wrong. It is universal since it's fundamental to being a social animal. There's a cost to being at odds with a group. We do have all sorts of mechanism and rituals, formal and informal, to minimize or amortize that cost in all sorts of settings but it's still there and it's still essential. You look at the faces of your coworkers in a meeting in which you're making some unpopular proposal to see how it's going over and you feel the slight sting of recognizing the smallest hints of disapproval. It's built right into all human interaction.
I guess we shall have to agree to disagree there.
> I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.
Downvoting is a legitimate expression of disagreement according to PG.
He's probably wrong about it. Imagine if you could do that in real life.
There are some shibboleths that you absolutely can't touch or you'll be downvoted rigorously. But less than on other fora.
Your comment being downvoted for suggesting dissenting opinions are not treated well on HN kinda makes your point. I agree in general and spend less time here because of it. HN is still not as bad as many alternatives, but I wouldn't say it's great for ideologically diverse views.
If you think your dissenting opinions should be popular, your opinions probably aren't all that dissenting. This person's dissenting meta-opinion is unpopular, it's still there and it's still being discussed. Discomfort is inherent in dissent, it's not people putting a lot of likes on your NormanRockwellFourFreedomsPainting.gif.
It's not that they need to be popular, it's that voting them down leads them to be dropped off from view (and makes it less likely dissenting views will be shared). Reddit is the extreme case of this where anything outside the majority group consensus is heresy to be voted down/hidden/banned.
Better sites don't do this and have in-good-faith discussion despite disagreement.
Can you link some of these better discussions on better sites?
Dissenting views are regularly highly visible, often as replies to consensus views. Even better - well-argued counter-narrative/counter-conventional wisdom views regularly appear as top or highly ranked comments. That's because the people making those arguments do what sensible people do when making an unpopular argument - they put in the work to make their case more persuasive. They don't sit around complaining that the other kids don't listen to them, they care about their issue enough to try to work with human nature rather than hoping some magical technology will change human nature for them.
The problem is HN is mainly left leaning so its difficult to have discussion at times as dang and the community will shut it down quickly as differing opinions are not welcome even if its factual.
(chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS nOt TrUe")
(Love how HN proved my comment as correct)
> (chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS nOt TrUe")
> (Love how HN proved my comment as correct)
Please don't do this here. It's against the site guidelines (see the bottom: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which guarantees downvotes, and then the combination of help-help-I'm-being-repressed and I-told-you-so is annoying to pretty much everyone.
As for "left leaning", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 (Feb 2021). The specific examples are old now but there is an endless fresh supply from each tap.
Yeah, as someone who has criticized the mod team, saying you are biased is just laughable. You go out of your way to be as unbiased and user-oriented as possible. My biggest criticism is procedural, Dan and friends are doing good work.
> HN is mainly left leaning
This is largely an illusion, as can be seen by the number of people complaining in the other direction about how wacko libertarians or MAGA or whatever dominate on here.
What you're actually observing is that HN is one of the more diverse public spaces you participate in and there's no personalized algorithm that filters the content to only show what you want. When your exposure to left-leaning content goes from <10% on an algorithmic feed to ~50% on HN, it feels like being overrun.
Just know that it feels just as overwhelming to the left-leaning people on here, and they will jump to the same interpretation in the opposite direction.
If 2 people end up in a civilised debate. It’s not uncommon for people to flag and downvote the opinion they disagree with even if the opinion is valid or backed up with facts. Feelings get too hurt here.
That's why you have to earn down vote and flagging privileges here. It's still abused, I agree.
It's not left leaning, it's establishment leaning. But that's only regarding politics and social issues.
Sure but I'm not even talking politics! My comment itself was barely a criticism of HN and, yeah, downvotes don't matter - but it's exactly what I am talking about. Any push against that coziness/bubble is not tolerated.
I do think it's OK for some forums - if the community agrees - to say certain topics (like politics) are off limits.
I don't really think it's ok for a community to say discussion about what should be discussed is off limits... or being critical of policies, the bubble, etc...
> My comment itself was barely a criticism of HN
Your comment is (a) off-topic and (b) smacks of a complaint about not getting enough up-votes. Neither of these areas are looked upon positively in HN. If this style of comment is your modus operandi, it may explain why your work is not well-received, and in short it has nothing to do with the popularity of your opinions.
With respect, those are two strawmen.
No, I am just describing your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43559544
It's not off topic, as it's discussing moderation and the culture of the forum in a post about moderation & replying to someone discussing the culture, and I said nothing about upvotes. It is two strawmen without discussing any of the substance of my comments.
I think the fact that you're being downvoted for your comment proves your point.
There is a difference between downvoting and flagging, and between flagging and moderating.
The effect is the same — the comment becomes unreadable.
I said nothing about that.
And me pointing it out is also being downvoted.
Probably because a single example at a single time point can't really be extrapolated to the entire platform across all times. The comment being downvoted proves nothing (as evidenced by the fact it's now upvoted to the 2nd top comment!)
And this comment of yours I'm replying to will probably get downvoted because it's a complaint about votes that contributes literally nothing to the conversation (in fact, detracts from it).
> because it's a complaint about votes
It's not a complaint. I'm just pointing them out. Without them I couldn't argue my case at all.
Yes, because the comments are offtopic and against the site guidelines (see the bottom of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
"I the noble freethinker, standing bravely against the mob" comments are boring and repetitive, and therefore always off topic.
It's exactly my point that it's impossible to be critical of these guidelines on here, and I think that's a problem.
HN does not welcome dissenting opinions in certain areas of tech where the individual freedoms of techies come into conflict with status quo social harms to non-techies; so, for example, you won’t see many HN articles about the ethical dilemmas of working at Palantir, how our industry’s libertarian foundations obstruct labor organizing today, what advantages the ‘bros’ receive in return for their misogyny, and so on. HN is a light-touch moderation site — as libertarian as possible, in keeping with our roots — so I certainly don’t hold the mods as responsible for the community’s defensiveness in that regard. In general, whether tech or otherwise, it’s not possible for a community to welcome uncomfortable dissent against its own underpinnings without a heavier hand on the moderation wheel than is cultural acceptable for HN and for our community. That doesn’t mean that HN rejects all dissent — certainly they may be other pillars of obstinance I haven’t personally identified and studied over the past fifteen or twenty years participating here — but, yes, absolutely, HN’s community has zero tolerance for certain dissent.
You don't see those articles because they get flagged instantly by users. You'll see plenty of comments on it though.
I'm like 80% sure this is trolling as a tee up for all the people responding with "HECK YEA DISSENT IS HAPPENING." :D
Now that we have an Australian, suppose I'll have to change my tactic of waiting for dang to go to bed before being naughty, how annoying.
Nice to see another helper. Dan, you are truly wonderful and I hope you never leave us, however, I also hope this affords you some much deserved "time off". Welcome Tom, and how.
Welcome welcome! It's crazy to think of how relatively long-lasting HN's influence on startups and tech has already been.
Congratulation Tom! :) Thank you for doing what you do here. Appreciate it.
The question is, who among is willing to be the object of tomhow's first official Unsportsmanlike Conduct penalty? ;)
Welcome Tom, thank you and Dan for helping to run one of the best corners of the web for many of us.
Curious that you both made new accounts, is that basically a similar thing to having a "root" user then? So you can't use a normal / previous account or it will ruin it? :)
No, it's just a device to mark the context switch and to avoid misunderstandings, since the previous comments were all posted without an implicit "mod" bit.
Ah that makes sense! Thanks for the clarification. It's always interesting learning how HN operates.
Unsung heroes deserve praise. Cheers mate.
Welcome! can we call you tang?
Nice! Thanks for the good work.
Good luck tom in your new role!
Thanks for being a crucial part of this crucial part of my life, Tom.
Congrats mate, hope it’s a smooth transition into the limelight for you
I thought he was just a character from Cryptonomicon.
As somebody who's seen communities come and go over the last couple of decades, I cannot praise Hacker News highly enough. And we can thank the moderators for that. HN is like an oasis for me: polite, sane, and informative, and your values and principles really shine through, especially below the fold.
Thanks for keeping the standards so high here!
Tom has now put Australia in the spotlights :P
WA here, hehe. Congrats!
I thought it is an April fool joke about having Tom Holland as moderator.
My bad.
Great news and best of luck during this period of high tensions.
> He and Gackle have discussed diversifying their team, and adding a third moderator who is non-white, non-male, and, Bell joked, “non-balding.” Gackle clarified: “We've talked to each other about that. But we wouldn't make it a requirement.”
Without any negativity on Tom, whom I'm sure is excellent, I suspect you failed on this one @dang.
Are mods on HN paid or do they just do it for the love of the game?
Dang is paid: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over...
We're both paid.
Welcome! Excited to be under your wing Tom! Thank you Dan!
What’s the purpose of having a less clear username?
It's about as clear as mine is. Weak binding between user handle and real identity has always been part of internet forum culture—at least in the deep section of the pool that HN likes to swim in.
Thank you for what has to be a tough job.
Thanks for taking on this role tomhow! It's seriously appreciated and I'm also heaps happy that there's now someone in Oz that can moderate while dang gets some no doubt much-needed sleep! Champions! Thanks for making HN so bloody choice! Over of the best places on the 'net for damned sure!
A: Welcome!
And B: Just curious, what was dang's old longname?
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gruseom
I would guess some version of "Daniel Gackle", as seen at the very bottom of https://www.ycombinator.com/people.html
'gruseom
Moin Tom,
Thanks for putting up with the work - let's go!
Warm welcome Tom! Hope it’s an easy gig.
Any comments on this post regarding moderation at hacker news:
https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i...
Power means being able to ignore the naysayers.
What does that comic strip say, "Everything's fine."?
Most people desire nothing more than to ignore their own faults, unless they have the power to shut up their critics.
Congrats Tom! Thank you for your service.
Congrats! Keep on making HN what it is!
Isn't HN self-moderating with upvote/downvote/flagging? I have an impression that the notion of moderator comes from old forums (e.g. phpBB) where they didn't have those features.
Votes are not moderation. Ignoring manipulation tactics, majority consensus does not mean that something is right, acceptable, or in line with site guidelines.
Welcome, Tom and thank you Dang.
Welcome! Just do your best.
Welcome tomho!
Tom what was your company in YC W09? And how did it go?
This is what it became:
https://volantio.com
https://amadeus.com/en/airlines/products/volantio
https://amadeus.com/en/blog/articles/creating-a-private-resa...
Welcome Tom, it is great that you came to Dang's aid because I was starting to worry how much longer one person could do this great job brilliantly alone.
Congrats and welcome!
Oh hey. Congrats, tomhow!
Welcome tomhow. I really appreciate the HN community and the efforts from the moderation team at helping to shape it into what it has become.
Welcome Tom, all the best with your new role and thanks for being a moderator along with Daniel :-)
It’s good to see MGR (Moderator Geographic Redundancy) being implemented on HN ;-)
Using RAID as an analogy, we now have RAID 1 moderators so let’s hope to have RAID 6 soon :-P
Ok ok, enough with the silly tech jokes and the smiley’s.
Congratulations!
Congrats Tom!
Dang, and Tom: I think it would be useful for you two moderators to use a "special" color, instead of the light gray that is used for any other username.
I've always resisted that, and I suppose it's fair to say pg did too. It feels like an unnecessary barrier between us and others.
It does feel very natural on Reddit (where mods can enable a flag/green user name when it's a mod response).
I agree, it helps make HN feel like a special place.
The best way to provide feedback is by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. I've received a reply to literelly every email I've ever sent (all credit to Dang and Co for being extremely kind and consistent in supporting my inner troll rehabilitation effort).
There is no site mechanism to alert moderators about @mentions, and due to sheer volume of messages the site operators will typically never get to see your well-intentioned message.
This thread does have better odds of being read than most, though :) cheers
I believe the standard for annotating the utterance of deities is red text.
I propose it should be based on the specified accent color ("topcolor").
Welcome Tom!
Congrats Tom!
Thinking far ahead, is there some way we can train LLMs that will moderate the same way as dang?
Congrats, Tom!
I have to say HN is one of the best moderated online forums/sites on the web. dang does a great job. Even when he disagrees with you and moderates he is open to communication, clarification and adult conversation. I really appreciate his work and have no doubt tomhow will do the same.
I will post this every year on moderator day as a sign of respect for this place. http://cosmonautdreams.com/images/dang.jpg
Good luck Tom. I do not envy the people that take on the work required to moderate this site while remaining unbiased and I am glad you are ready for the challenge. I am sure you will do a fantastic job.
you (few?) do one of the biggest jobs on the internet. it's been a bit of a vice, but sufficiently rarefied that it doesn't lower anyone for indulging it. thank you.
it's said that perfect means lacking nothing essential to its whole. I've often speculated about the mechanics behind it, but really, it's a product that I think achieves today what apple and a lot of others aspire to be, where it does something well enough that almost nobody stops to question how. even if - or especially, when - that's probably the most interesting question of all.
how do you replicate it? you can't. that's the point.
may the odds ever be in your favour!
Welcome, Tom. Not easy shoes to fill! Moderation can be tricky.
Welcome, Tom. Are you a Neal Stephenson fan? There's a memorable character in Cryptonomicon who shares your name...
Good Morning Oz! Congrats, you're on overnight duty
G'day! 24/7 SRE coverage. Yay! R stands for respectability.
Congrats!
Welcome Tom, Thanks for all the hard work you've done in secret and in advance for what you're about to do in open.
Welcome!
Welcome, Tom!
Welcome Tom - great to see, that both of you and yc cares for this important corner of the internet.
I don't envy any referee who hopes to keep politics and technology in separate corners and playing by Queensberry Rules. But good luck all the same.
When the technologists enter politics it is even harder!
I immediately thought of the wrestler LMAO
For the kayfabe?
Welcome Tom and thank you for helping out this wonderful community.
Just out of curiosity, are you and dang payed for caring for this forum? It seems to me it requires a lot of time and dedication.
It is an actual job, yes :)
It actually works like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40014518 and they just threw another person into the maple syrup/bacta tank
Both are paid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560796
Good luck Tom.
nice to meet you tom https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.profigh...
Hi, Same Tom Howard from osnews.com ??
That's Thom Holwerda.
Well, that's an embarrassing mistake.
Thanks.
Well, it is kind of similar. And for a split second you really made me think it was him, so it's not that big a mistake :)
>He's still kind and thoughtful
Me thinks the OP is really trying to dive this point home for some reason ...
/s
I was just trying to be funny but it's a point I'm happy to drive!
Welcome to the job Tom. :-)
Could you or Dang please explain, why this post with 118 points and 121 comments in 3 hours, about news of the day highly relevant to anybody in Tech, only shows up on page 18?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253
Just trying to understand the algo...
You can see the front page for each day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front
Tom, please fix the flag abuse problem. It's gotten to the point where I realize there's no point in commenting on many threads, given my opinions, some of which are very normal nationally.
When I've found myself being publicly tsk'ed by the people around me, I've taken a moment to try go figure out why they disapprove of what I'm saying. It's been a useful life exercise.
Sometimes you're right, sometimes they are. Sometimes, as the Rick & Morty quote goes, "Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer."
For sure, but then the followup question is "do I want to spend my time and energy around a bunch of people I think are wrong?'
If they're correct, maybe?
If they're correct, and constantly telling you you're wrong...
… you have an opportunity for self-improvement.
Often times, you comment not to change the mind of the person you're replying to, but to provide a rebuttal for the readers at home. If nobody challenges problematic ideology or corrects misinformation, it can spread like a disease.
Shouldn't that be directed to those with an agenda who and are flagging certain posts?
Those of us who complain about this highly targeted flagging just want to avoid censorship. I can't see how we need to reflect on this.
Forums like this are "censored" and that's a really good thing. We don't need a steady stream of (for example) hate for women, minorities, and trans people that you see on truly uncensored forums.
This is correct. For the people who disagree, go read Slashdot at -1 for a while. Then pretend that you're one of the people who are targeted by that vitriol, and think about how much you'd read the HN comments if they were like that.
I agree, but when that is abused because of a minorities' preference, then it's bad.
That's what's happening here.
I think we need to get specific -- what preferences are you referring to, and who is the minority?
EcommerceFlow mentioned opinions that are "very normal nationally." I don't want to assume the worst so I'm trying not to read in to that.
I mean, I don’t generally like to go over somebody’s posting history because it feels like stupid very-online silliness, but they brought it up.
I see some unflagged center-right political opinions sometimes. It is stuff that a mainstream democrat would probably disagree with but find, like, not odious or offensive. Therefore I think they are just getting flagged because any political opinions here have a chance of getting flagged. This is how the website is supposed to work, if we as a community decided that mainstream political opinions were ok, the site would become a place to argue about what exactly is considered mainstream.
All illegal speech should be hidden from public discussion.
However, it would be disconcerting if stating biological facts led to censorship on a forum that focusses on science and technology.
The definition of "hate" has been stretched a lot over the last few years, and if that restricts discussion of facts and ideas, then it is harmful.
One major problem is when people presume that their simplistic understanding of a subject is factual, and that everyone else is going off emotion. For example, some people will erroneously claim that the 2 genetic human options are "XX = woman, XY = man". Those seem to be the most likely combinations, partly because we don't collect DNA from 100% of the population and compare it to the observed anatomy, but they're clearly and documentedly not the only options.
Even without considering trans people, it's factually untrue that "XX = woman, XY = man, and those are the only possibilities." And yet, people who stopped at high school biology will argue until they're blue in the teeth that anyone with a more nuanced take is anti-science.
Yes and some people will also make scientifically inaccurate claims like "sex is a spectrum" and "there are more than two sexes" and "it is possible for humans to change sex".
There's a great deal of misunderstanding around this topic. Having open-minded, interesting and reflective discussion about topics like this should however lead to greater understanding. But that is not possible if it gets flagged and censored.
"Stating biological facts" is code for an opinion about how society should view trans people, which is off-topic for HN.
If stating certain facts is made illegal (by our democratically-elected representatives) then by all means HN will need to censor those facts for the sake of its own self-preservation.
But until then, we should be free to state facts.
> The old adage “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it” was once a touchstone of liberal society. Having been involved for most of my adult life in areas of social debate, it was a phrase I once commonly heard. Not any more.
> Instead, public discourse is marked by efforts to find offence, destroy the character of opponents or ensure reason is smothered by emotional manipulation.
> -- John Deighan https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/banning-those-w...
"Stating facts" does not mean you are following the other rules of the site.
For example, if you irrelevantly post "My software is on sale now for 10% off and here is the link!" on every story, everything in it is factual, but it's spam regardless.
I'm sure your specific facts that you want to post are in service of a particular social or political viewpoint you are trying to push, one that the people flagging find either off-topic or odious. And, given that you refuse to elaborate on what specific facts you think are banned, reveals that you think you only can convince people by being vague about what specifically you mean.
I'd love to be clearer about my common-sense, scientifically-backed viewpoints, but if I did so it might result in hostile action being taken against me. So I choose not to.
Not because I'm insincere about my views, or because I believe they are harmful - but because the activists pushing the ideological views I oppose have been demonstrably violent and destructive.
[flagged]
They are flagging posts that they see as pushing an agenda. There isn’t some official separation of agenda-less and agenda-full ideas.
Posts that break guidelines should be flagged, and the bar should be pretty high.
I don't think there is a guideline that bans posts from "pushing an agenda" (which would be very subjective)
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
"Agendas" are often ideological battlegrounds. I flag comments, even those I agree with, that I recognize from experience are going to lead to the same tired, off-topic debates and flame wars.
Lately, I've also been maintaining a personal uBlock Origin filter list to hide certain prolific rule breakers. I would love if HN had an equivalent built-in "killfile"[0] functionality for auto-hiding submissions and comments. (This has been suggested to the admins, and was seemingly received favorably, but I'm sure it's a matter of resources.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
How do you feel about flags being public?
That would be very positive IMO. It would expose bad actors.
However, the bar for creating new accounts is low, so bad actors could create lots of accounts cheaply and use them for flagging. That's why I think flagging needs to be a privilege that requires a high user "trust level" - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43559629
I draw a distinction between posts and comments here.
Comments that are "pushing an agenda" are noticeable because they Just. Will. Not. Deviate. From. The. Party. Line. Ever. They will never acknowledge an opposing viewpoint's point, no matter how valid. It's not a good faith conversation, and it deserves to be both downvoted and flagged. When one side (or both!) is like talking to a brick wall, this is often what's going on.
Posts are harder. If user X posts articles pushing a viewpoint, that's harder to prove that they're intending to do that. Or it would be, except that user X will also usually be active in the discussion about the article, and their comments will fit the above pattern. If you see that, then you can say that the post was probably pushing an agenda as well.
Despite being a small-ish site, HackerNews does still suffer from the Reddit problem of having enough users that you often don’t get to really know anybody. Realistically most conversations here only go back and forth for like 3 or so comments on each side. I mean, the site is structured to promote that kind of thing; reply buttons start getting hidden after a point, right?
I don’t think anyone really can be convinced to deviate from a strongly held political belief in a handful of posts. At this point I think most people with any interest in politics have already seen every path through 4 or so posts around their opinions.
Standard talking point, standard counterpoint, standard objection that the the counterpoint is not back by data, request for citations, citation, argument that the math was wrong, and by now the thread is a week old and we’ve forgotten about it.
So, I wouldn’t say it is an issue of people being bad faith or overly obstinate. It’s just a bad format. Old phpBB boards and those sorts of sites were better for this sort of stuff, despite being mediocre, because at least you could remember who was who.
All right, here's an example. X makes a post on one side of a position. Y makes a thought-provoking reply on the other side. X replies with "So what's your point?" X either fails at reading comprehension, or X is trying to make it look like Y didn't have a point, because X doesn't have a good reply to Y's point, and X wants everybody else to not notice that Y actually had a good point.
I hate seeing that. It's a bad-faith argument. It's the sign of someone who's just there to argue, not to have a curious conversation. That is, it's a sign of someone who isn't within the spirit of the site guidelines.
No, I don't think this is just my personal bias against that style of posting. It's fake and juvenile, and it has no place on HN.
Another way you can tell: When they're replying to 20 comments with the same 2 or 3 talking points. That's someone who's there to do battle, not to have a conversation. They aren't really replying to the 20 comments, either - they're just spraying the same canned responses all over the place. That's not a conversation; that's a tape recorder in transmit-only mode.
I don't think the person getting flagged is always deserving of the dogpile. Your comment implies "you should take this time in timeout to think about your actions" which is just a gentler form of rhetorical struggle sessions, and not always warranted.
For sure. I've had comments flagged that I thought were perfectly reasonable and non-controversial. My first reaction was to be angry and annoyed. But then my kinder angels suggested that perhaps I phrased my idea poorly and people misunderstood that I was largely agreeing with them, or at least very respectfully disagreeing. And then I decided to be more careful with my phrasing next time.
Yeah the flagging is definitely much worse than it used to be. I’ve seen very legitimate LLM critical posts with lots of upvotes and comments flagged
Many people feel that flagging is worse than it used to be, but they don't agree at all on what should or shouldn't be flagged. That makes this feedback less actionable than one might assume.
HN gets tons and tons of threads that are critical of LLMs, so it's possible that the ones you're seeing get flagged are just below median quality and/or overly repetitive of previous discussions.
Hey, Dan. I'd be really interested if you could share more about the metrics. As the climate of the world around us has changed, I think a lot of us at least feel flagging has become a cudgel used to silence opposition. Me, for criticism of the current administration. Others, for their views on topics like gender.
Maybe we just care more and notice it about that subject now. Maybe it's always been this way. But while you often leave long comments that go into how these systems work and the struggles with trying to adjust them or understand of it's even necessary (good stuff), I would be fascinated to see a blog post or something where you really give us a talking to about the state of the community and anything y'all have been trying on your end.
Just a thought, obviously, you have a whole job moderating already! Have a good day!
Dan and Tom can speak to this, but by my reading of the guidelines, "criticism of the current administration" and "views on topics like gender" are both explicitly prohibited:
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
It has nothing to do with being on the side of "the opposition" or "the man," it's because those sorts of posts inevitably lead to the same, repetitive, off-topic debates and flame wars.
Flagging should be used as a cudgel against posts that break the rules. There are plenty of places on the internet to debate politics and gender; HN is not one of them.
No, I'm talking about stories that are extremely relevant to hacker news and techies.
Which is attested to by Dan repeatedly manually unflagging these posts afterwards, which is an explicit approval that these posts follow guidelines.
stories that are extremely relevant to hacker news and techies.
That's a difficult argument to make, especially without examples because at the end of the day, everything is related/relevant to everything somehow. HN's on-topicness remit is not really 'extremely relevant to techies'.
A political talking point can be nationally popular but still political, so, outside the scope of the site.
Anyway, which nation? I think we also aren’t allowed to push Communist party talking points here, despite that party being highly supported in some countries (not that I’d want to, just saying, nationally popular doesn’t mean much).
A lot of people don't read the Hacker News Guidelines⁽¹⁾ before submitting and deserve to be flagged. Quoting (emphasis mine):
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
⁽¹⁾ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You say that, but there was a big thread on Val Kilmer on the front page this morning...
He died, I'm fine with making an exception for it.
Why? He isn't relevant to HN at all. Is every celebrity death newsworthy on HN now?
Maybe he was significant to a lot of hackers. The death was also untimely, which reminds us to cherish the time we have. Many of us are in our 50s or 60s.
This is not really mysterious or anything, though, right? They allow bending of the rules for stuff that is not likely to devolve into a big stupid political flame war, because, like, pick your battles.
Also I’d expect there to be some annoying edge cases if they tried to ban that sort of discussion. I mean, Kilmer is not a tech person. But tech people die sometimes too. Arguably discussing their life as people is outside the scope of the site. Maybe we shouldn’t have had a conversation about how great a guy Mr. Moolenaar was and just discussed the technical aspects of his life’s work. But, come on, that’d not really be a human way of responding to somebody’s death, right?
If we’re going to have these sort of lightly rule breaking threads, then I don’t think it is necessary to ask the mods to adjudicate exactly who’s technical enough to warrant one. It’s a fuzzy spectrum anyway, we have tech people, tech policy people, STEM outreach people, tech YouTube influencers, celebrities that played beloved nerd characters.
> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon
Maybe time will tell if it was actually OT.
>Maybe time will tell if it was actually OT.
When that time comes, if it comes, then you'd be within the guidelines to post it.
Preemptively posting it just in case it later becomes some new phenomenon is not ideal.
Welcome Tom!
One thing I'd really like to see is less tactical flagging of content.
Hopefully with your additional help, people who suppress content they disagree with will be kept in check.
Open discourse is something that used to be sacrasanct in scientific and engineering circles. Over the last decade or so, free speech has been on the decline, and discussion is now very polarised along political lines.
For example, it's nearly impossible to discuss technical progress made by Elon Musk's companies without brigading by leftwing commenters, and I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away. This is self-serving behaviour by bad actors and should be addressed in order that HN is a politically-neutral forum for discussion, and not a leftwing echo chamber.
I understand, and lament, that the world is so polarised these days. There's a limit to what we in this little corner of the web can do to correct such powerful global macro trends, but we'll continue to try our best.
If you see things that are unfairly flagged, you can email us and we'll look at them. As long as comments/submissions are within the guidelines, we'll restore them.
We want HN to be a place where people can discuss contentious topics. This is a major reason why I've moved into an expanded role here. I think HN has been, and can continue to be, one of the better places on the internet for discussing contentious topics.
The thing to remember is the guiding principle of HN is curiosity. This place is not meant to be for ideological battle, or for trying to win arguments. It's for conversations where we can learn from each other about things we're curious about.
I've always liked to learn about the opposing side of whatever position I hold. That's why I've found HN to be so valuable, and I want it to be a place people to come to for that reason for many years into the future.
How effective are vouches in this regard?
I'll do that reasonably frequently on both posts and comments, though I'm not sure how effective that is.
One sec, let's look at the endpoint ... First page (30 entries) for each shows, at this writing:
- 13 dead of 30 vouched, submissions.
- 26 dead of 30 vouched, comments.
The endpoints for the uninitiated:
I'll also admit that at times that's a protest vote against mod interactions as well.(The URLs are only visible to the owner of the UID, and I presume, moderators as well.)
Flags are issued by regular users like us though. What do you expect a moderator to do, except maybe manually intervene to "un dead" something if it seems like a case of overly biased flagging? That's assuming mods have the ability to do that (I've always assumed that they do).
Flagging content should be a privilege that comes at a certain level of trust, and the privilege should be revoked by moderators for people that use flags to further an agenda.
Trust in forum users can be measured by various metrics - The Discourse forum software is a good example of how to do this: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-t...
People do get their flagging powers revoked for misuse. There was a time when I went on an overly aggressive flagging spree and my flags no longer had any effect. Months later I sent an email to hn@ycombinator.com to pledge more judicious use of flagging and to request the restoration of that power. I got it back then.
How do you know that people use flags to further an agenda? I for one both downvote and flag pretty often, but it's largely because I don't like the tone of the discourse, not because of some overarching ploy.
Since it's such a powerful action, it would be nice if flaggers had to at least justify the flag. Is it breaking a site rule? Is it spam? Is it not the original source? Does it actually violate the rules, or are you just using "Flag" as a mega-downvote for articles you don't personally like?
Yeah, that's the 'receipts for everything' idea and if you think it through, you'll realize it's at a minimum impractical and more likely just an outright bad idea. Where are these 'reasons' going to go? Who is going to read them or act on them? It sort of wants to stick it to those bad flaggers and misinformed downvoters or whatever but think about it applied to you. Do you not recoil at being asked by some random web app to justify your actions? Like, we're ostensibly here for conversation not to fill out TPS report cover sheets.
This is 'drink verification can' but for messageboards.
A lot of HN mechanism makes more sense if you can accept the idea that the goal is to promote good threads, and not, as so many people believe, to promote one set of opinions over another. Requiring justification for flags would immediately crud up threads with meta-debates.
A hard thing for people to accept, something that I think is an unstated part of the HN ethos but nevertheless real, is that it's almost always better to have no thread at all than a shitty one. Important topics will inevitably get an airing in one thread or another.
I've taken to linking to moderator admonishments (mostly dang, occasionally pg or sctb) where I think it might be helpful, e.g.:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478913>
This is not for every flag, by a long shot, and occurs (checking my history) perhaps a few times a month.
Note that the follow-up to the above link also earned another dang cite. Few justifications are original...
The practice seems ... not too disruptive, and at least modestly effective. It also gives me a track record of who's turned up before.
Linking quips both keeps my own voice out of the discussion, and mutes the impact on the page itself.
Requiring justification for flags would immediately crud up threads with meta-debates.
That is true and I used to say it but the receipts people evade it with non-public receipts (which can maybe later somehow be audited). So I'm switching to dunking on the thing for its martinetism and pointless bureaucracy. It feels more self-indulgently righteous to boot!
Frankly, I'd also love to see this for downvotes.
> I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away.
Huh, I always thought it was the other way around. Anything negative about Musk also gets quickly flagged and buried. I guess we can agree that Musk is currently a lightning rod, and brigades on both sides are acting to hide (positive and negative) coverage of his actions.
Some valid threads will get flagged because the comment section will be extremely predictable flame wars and have nothing to do with the article. That's the nature of social media. People can't help themselves. There's plenty of other social media sites for that sort of sports team drumbeating, so not much is lost by flagging some news article off the frontpage.
I hope people don't get punished for flagging Musk appreciation content. There's a lot that can be wrong with such submissions (cultism, uncritical praise, excessive volume, lack of substance, etc.).
> cultism, uncritical praise, excessive volume, lack of substance
All of which are subjective judgements on the content, which will naturally be reflective of a voter's political biases
You can’t eliminate subjective judgement, but cultism isn’t electoral politics, it’s about loving and adoring the guru, feeling great about how smart the guru is etc.
I will assist in reporting brigading leftist commenters. There are many of us that want to see politics out of commentary when unnecessary.
I’ll bet this will fix HN’s transparency issues.
[flagged]
You should supply links to whatever accounts you had that were banned, so readers can make up their own minds about what happened and how fair or unfair we were.
When someone makes claims about how they were unfairly treated, but won't let people look at the actual situation, that's sort of a tell. If the mods had actually treated them so badly, you can be sure that it would be pointed to with neon hypertext.
Here are a few shadowbanned users I saw in a /single/ thread (who don't know they're shadowbanned as they prolifically comment away), whose comments are pretty normie-tier:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oldpersonintx https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tomohawk https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=techright75
(There seems to be extreme bias or unfair flagging by users simply because "old Texan" and "techright" are "scary Conservative-sounding usernames", yet you pursue the innocents being reported rather than the botfarms mass-flagging?)
It's all very "Everyone Stalin's sending to the gulags is a criminal, though, so keep your nose down and mind your own business." God sees everything, you know.
Right, so mods can claim it's my alt and ban me for ban evasion, while the buttkissers comb her history for anything too "techbro"-sounding to prove that she "had it coming". Not my first rodeo, Danny boy.
upvoted.. not because I agree, but because dissent has to be tolerated in a civil society.
I would like to see more discussion on HN around topics that seem unpopular here, and are perhaps politically divisive .. such as : economic inequality, climate change, demographic crunch
Somewhere between the prevailing economic malaise, cynicism and despair ... and tech-bro fan-boi greedy optimism : there might be a middle way where we can use the new technologies of AI to actually improve our lives and create wide wealth generation, and more prosperity for the middle class.
I am firm believer in the right to free speech and the importance of expressing ideas that are contrary to the general cultural attitude.
That’s why I turn on the Show Dead setting on HN, and I love that HN has that feature.
Save your upvotes for people positively contributing.
Thanks for replying; I had positive karma, now I have negative karma and am lucky I'm not shadowbanned yet. Whether you agree with the comments that got this user shadowbanned, do you agree with shadowbanning this user for these comments? Because it was only for these comments and nothing else.
I think it's great to see more moderation from non-Americans.
My biggest critique of this site is that the user base and moderation seems very biased with American perspectives to the detriment of the non-American user base and the quality of content as a whole.
dang is Canadian.
I.e. North American.
I say this as a Canadian -- So he's basically Canadian-lite culturally.
I want to see more moderation from people around the world, with less geographic and cultural proximity to the Bay area.
Oops, I meant American-Lite.