You're burning your credibility here fast as the new moderator. dang derived his respect as an admin from not getting into fights in the threads. It additonaly tarnishes your credibility as you're doing this in defense of your employer. You look like a rage-poster who has the same response copied and ready to go from thread to thread.
Please take a moment to step back and examine if this is the image you want to be projecting as the official representative of YC and HN.
Where we get it wrong, I'm happy for it to be pointed out so we can improve. That's always been the case with HN moderation, and it's what I like about the work. The community demands that we operate to a high standard, and is quick to call us out when we get things wrong. That's the way it should be.
Where it stops being OK is when people make false (or extrapolated-to-the-point-of-absurdity) claims about YC’s actions/intentions, and its influence on HN moderation (and thus HN’s integrity).
Where this happens, the least I can do is (a) provide some balancing context when claims/insinuations are made of, say, YC's leaders being in cahoots with the administration and HN moderators enabling it because it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it, and (b) ask people who accuse us of censorship to provide details of their claims so we can explain it or investigate further.
I know I'm not going to please or win credibility from everybody, especially those who seem motivated to portray HN moderation and YC management in the worst possible light.
But the problem is that if we let these claims/accusations sit there without any balancing context, people who are open-minded will read them and think they are accurate, then form a negative opinion of YC and HN, based on incomplete information or falsehoods.
I realised just how damaging this can be when I spent time around the YC offices in SF in the past month, for the first time in a few years, spending lots time with dang and in staff meetings and having casual chats with YC staff and partners and startup founders. I realised just how different the vibe and attitude is, and how different the orientation towards politics is, compared to how it is so often portrayed in HN comments.
I also saw how frustrated and dispirited dang is by being subjected to these accusations for so long. And it hit me that these kinds of comments have become so pervasive on HN for so long that even I – who has been behind the scenes at HN for years (but not in the office) – had started to believe them, and become disenchanted about YC. And only when I spent time in the office and in the meetings did I realise just how much of an inaccurate portrayal they are.
I don't for a moment think YC is perfect, and I have plenty of my own ideas about how it can be doing better. And it's still very much the case that HN is an independent arm of YC, and it's not the moderators' role to defend or advocate for YC management.
But I think it’s important that we can provide balancing context when assertions are made about HN moderation and YC's influence on our moderation practices.
(Edited 5th par to be less dismissive/accusatory.)
Alternatively, hi tom, you're a human being with opinions and you're allowed to discuss whatever you like on this site just like anyone else.
i think dang is successful at moderation in part because he does have a reputation and track record of being fair and unbiased in his moderation, and i do agree showing bias in conversations can make people question moderation decisions more, but i'm not sure tom is showing bias by including information relevant to people he knows, and i think he can both discuss however he likes while also being transparent and genuine in unbiased moderation
tom has and does stay out of debates and in-depth conversations around HN related stuff. he's simply dropping some information in to dispel disinformation, which i think is reasonable
Administration and participation in arguments or opinion based debates should not coincide. Using a personal account for personal issues instead of using an administrator is more respectable in my opinion.
Other than routine moderation comments, my comments have all been focused on correcting falsehoods or misconceptions about HN moderation, including claims or insinuations about YC management’s explicit or implicit influence on HN moderation.
Can you point to a comment of mine where that's not the case? I'll happily have it pointed out so I can avoid it in future.
Because today’s post is a repeat/dupe of the same story that was on the front page for 18 hours a week ago and attracted 1100 upvotes and 600+ comments. It was one of the biggest stories all year on HN:
What is even the logic here? I understand the concept that when you have multiple threads going on about one article or story AT THE SAME TIME… then sure, the dupe option makes sense.
When you are manually putting a dupe tag on a story because someone posted it a week ago I think people feel very differently about that.
This is very literally the kind of behaviour people are referring to when they make the accusation that the mods are actively interfering with what people want to talk about.
This idea that you’re here telling me and others with a straight face that everything is above board while also doing this just doesn’t pass the credibility test, the logic makes no sense.
This is the way HN has always been moderated. Well, for at least 10 years. It's in the FAQ [1]
If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
It's nothing to do with it being political. It's simply to do with being a duplicate of a story that has already been heavily discussed, just a week ago.
It's a well established convention that a topic is only eligible for further front page exposure when there is "significant new information" (SNI) [2].
There have been many instances of SNI with respect to DOGE this year, which is why there have been (I believe) more front-page stories about it on HN than anything else [3].
The krebs on security detail was published just yesterday. While it's the same event, krebs is an authoritative source which has more detail than the npr source.
The threshold is Significant New Information ("SNI"), where "significant" implies that it's material enough to alter the dimensions of the story. I don't think many people were left uncertain by the NPR story.
What you are saying is the fantastical kool-aid Fox News and alt-right media spin to you.
In the meantime, Trump is actually deporting people without due process to inhumane torture camps run by a dictator while openly bragging about it and defying court orders.
> What you are saying is the fantastical kool-aid Fox News and alt-right media spin to you.
What I'm replying to is the fantastical Kool-aid MSNBC and alt-left media spin. I'm pretty sure the Republicans are not going to be rounding up and killing minorities despite hyperbolic descriptions like "people who literally want to kill me and deport my good friends to guantanamo bay cuba".
Wait, you're saying El Salvador is a dictatorship? From briefly glancing at Wikipedia I don't see any evidence of that. Why the need to smear another country just to make Trump look worse?
I was there during the onavo scandal. It was straight up spyware. They would regularly show graphs of snapchat usage vs messenger vs whatsapp and the snapchat data was explicitly attributed to onovo logs.
The public cruelty is the point. Make people suffer horrendously outsized consequences for the most minor of innocent infractions and it quickly sends a message that you're not welcome here.
First, do it for your own safety. A wrong form or the wrong answer to a verbal question after 18 hours of travel could land you in weeks of brutal detention.
Second, do it to help the cause. We here in America need to suffer the consequences of our actions. We need to see conferences canceled. We need to see imports stopped. We need to see people refusing to bring their knowledge and expertise here.
It is going to be a long, dark four years for the globe. It's going to take all of us working from within and without to have any hope of dismantling this evil empire.
When the people in charge are acting like the dumbest bully from my grade school, then yes, it does sound like valid critism and a legitimate point of discussion.
I submitted it as a post this week. It survived for about 3 minutes before being flagged as a dupe and then deleted without any link to the conversation it was supposedly a dupe of. I did some cursory searching and could not find another conversation.
It’s amazing to me how fast the VC tech world fell to their knees in front of king musk and his orange jester trump. I’m almost ready to invest in knee replacement surgery supply companies.
It seems like an obvious opinion. Not that it's obviously true, but that the evidence for it is obvious - as in, it shouldn't be a confusing or surprising opinion for somebody to have. You may perfectly reasonably disagree with it, but that's not the same as asking somebody to summarize the story so far under the pretense that you don't know what they're talking about.
You asked a very subjective, opinion-based question, and called the answer offered "objectively horrible" and "speculative". That doesn't seem to make sense, besides being unnecessarily antagonistic.
Re: Downvotes - You said, "I asked a perfectly reasonable question and was downvoted", then went on to say something about downvoters having their blinders on. That's sarcastic complaining. In general, commenting on your own downvotes like that looks bad (underdog syndrome), is distracting, and also self-fulfilling (complaining about downvotes is something that invites downvotes).
You're burning your credibility here fast as the new moderator. dang derived his respect as an admin from not getting into fights in the threads. It additonaly tarnishes your credibility as you're doing this in defense of your employer. You look like a rage-poster who has the same response copied and ready to go from thread to thread.
Please take a moment to step back and examine if this is the image you want to be projecting as the official representative of YC and HN.