You also have to understand why draconian measures are in place... it’s weakness. This is a site full of people who could never be banned, only whichever account they use at the time. Tons of moderation online depends on user ignorance, and when that fails you have to roll out the dirty tricks.

It is literally all they have which works at all. It’s this, or hiring a few hundred mods to sift through absolutely everything, which comes with its own issues. I’m not sure how you would improve this system without radically changing it, especially while trying to minimize the impact of bad actors.

That's actually true, but not in the sense that most people mean it. Usually when I hear this it means something like "HN promotes YC's business and suppresses criticism of YC", phrased in more sinister language. But that of course would be the dumbest way to operate such a site, especially with this crowd.

The way we promote YC's interests is simply by trying to keep HN interesting. The most interesting HN is the most valuable-to-YC HN. That's why people come here, so that's all we optimize for. Literally everything we do with site moderation derives from that.

For example, why do we moderate flamewars? Not because we secretly agree with one side or the other but because flamewars are repetitive and therefore bad for curiosity. Plus they encourage people to do worse things, so their damage extends forward in time. These are empirical observations, not moral edicts. We just look for what makes HN richer and more complex vs. what makes it dumber. Scorched earth makes it dumber.

I remember years ago hearing a radio interview with the CEO of Costco. When asked, "What would you say to Wall Street analysts who criticize you for giving all those benefits to your employees?" he replied, "I would say have you ever run a major retailer?" Something similar is how I feel when people criticize how we moderate HN. The trouble isn't the criticism—I'd be delighted to be shown how to do this better. The trouble is that the criticisms usually aren't relevant to the actual problem of running HN, which is: how to maximize the interestingness of a public-anonymous internet forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity. Maximizing interestingness includes preventing decay.

I hope that doesn't sound complainy. We're all lucky to have the opportunity to participate in an experiment like this. It derives from two things, btw: pg's own curiosity, which started the site, and the fact that the people running YC get HN's core value. It's an unusual set of conditions and we're all responsible for making something interesting of it.

p.s. I forgot to add that there are also some formal ways that HN gives back to YC: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs and https://news.ycombinator.com/launches.

The desire to suppress "flamewars" is great, but once one has a tool called a "flamewar detector" it's easy to lose sight of the fact that not everything that triggers the detector is in fact a flamewar that should be suppressed. Occasionally (rarely? frequently?) what's being suppressed is high quality fast-paced discussion. Once one has a tool that provides some degree of the benefit (the flamewar detector), I'd guess that it can be easy to confuse the actual goal with the incidental behavior.

I'm intrigued by this idea of "expected failure". That is, cases where the outcome is actually non-desirable, but since the software worked according to spec, the failure is considered a success by those who designed the software. How do you go about assessing whether the suppression is having the desired effect? Is it based on something more subtle than slowing down the rate of commenting when it's going "too fast"? Are there knobs that can be tweaked to keep it from triggering on desired discussion?

Scott and I get emailed every time that software trips so we can quickly look at which threads are being penalized and reverse the penalty when it isn't helpful. The only time we don't do that is when we're sleeping.

We tend to call it the 'overheated discussion detector' these days, since it detects more than flamewars. However, that phrase is more awkward to say than 'flamewar detector'. If anyone can come up with a better name I'd love to hear it.

Turning that software off is not an option, because HN would be overwhelmingly more dominated by flamewars if we did so. It's not primarily the individual threads that I fear, it's the systemic effects of having them be more dominant. HN exists most of all for the quieter, deeper, more out-of-the-way finds that would be the first to get excluded under such a regime. That would really be an existential risk to HN.

Incidentally, that last point generalizes. When people complain that we don't do X, for some obvious X, it isn't because we don't value X (e.g. free speech or whatnot). It's because we're worried about systemic effects.

What are the quality metrics?

People who ask us about this usually would prefer a world in which all such calls would be free of human interpretation. That's a fantasy, in my opinion. We don't try.

This is a straw man argument. Simply revealing on what basis the decision was made and letting the community voice approval or disapproval would go a very long way.

Consider a title change decision. Most of the time, title changes are minor and reasonable, but once in a while they effectively hide what is interesting about the story from readers. Readers should simply be able to vote on whether or not the title change was helpful, so that mods can learn from those votes how to effectively moderate the forum.

Similarly, it would make sense to reveal any strategies that are used to improve HN such as deducting points from stories, etc, and to make it obvious when this has been done to a story, so that the community can express approval or disapproval of the decision.

I think the main fallacy that the moderation approach embodies is the idea that by simply not discussing politics HN is avoiding becoming political. That is not the case at all. By suppressing or avoiding important political issues, HN is making a very vocal political statement that those issues should be ignored.

Instead, why not bless certain HN users to write comments on highly political articles that will be pinned to the top of the page to give voice to reasoned and discussion-shaping views. This would break the cycle of highly politicized retorts and rejoinders that is what HN should actually be trying to avoid. The key here is to grant more trust to the community, not less. There are a lot of people on HN whose views I deeply respect, and when there is an important issue going on I want to know what they think about it.

Human editorial is fine, but banning/throttling/suppressing users and views is a sinister way to express editorial views. You can frame it as being about manners, but it's rarely actually about manners.

Edit: My account seems to have been throttled for 30+ minutes. Thanks for the mature response.

Just because something is familiar doesn't mean it's not worth exploring. Often seemingly familiar things are misunderstood because we don't take the time to understand them.

> ...what things make the HN ecosystem more rich and complex vs. what things make it dumber...

I think "flamewar" avoidance leaves HN a little flat, actually. There is a lot rich and complex in giving the usual tech/SV crowd a challenge to its viewpoint from time to time. The goal isn't always changing minds or learning new things. Sometimes it's just to realize that smart people can disagree with us, and because of that, we need to respect people that disagree with us.

Maybe we need to let passionate, smart people have it out from time to time so everyone can be reminded which positions can stand up to the flames just fine. Otherwise, we forget that the farces of "them" that we enjoy are just farces, not reality. And that makes us dumber. And boring. And intellectually stale.

These can quickly dominate the threads. That repels the smarter people. This is how we could fall into a death spiral. Worse, the risk grows as the site grows, because then more people are attracted to it for wrong reasons. (Right reason: curiosity. Wrong reason: hearing the sound of one's own voice, or making others do so.)

To sustainably have a forum of the kind you describe, you'd need to close it off from the public internet. We're not going to do that with Hacker News, so we have guidelines to prevent it. This does come at the cost of leaving the site "a little flat", as you say—I've made the same point in the past using the word bland instead of flat. But better flat than dead.

While it may be enticing to think of a flamewar as a crucible for good discussion, I think that it's far from the case. Fierce, passionate criticism is not the same thing as people talking past each other to attack straw men. There's little time or incentive to sift through the ashes looking for some purified argument that's withstood the flames when you can rush into the next thread in the forum where the a new fire is just getting started. This is pretty clear to see when the same ideological discussions are rewarmed again and again.

And battle is not how you get there.

I think HN has been a place for lively debate at times. Perhaps it shall be again.

I have this hypothesis that thinking is layered on top of our two primal emotional strategies for stress: connection and aggression become diffuse mode (how is it similar?) and focused mode (how is it different?). When i use the word “battle” I am suggesting repurposing aggression so that instead of directing it at each other in defense of our positions and ego (system 1 thinking) we are working together synergistically in a battle for the truth which will enable us to solve the problem (system 2 thinking).

i.e. Turning a zero sum game into a positive sum game.

As for suppressing critique... well... that seems to be the case, but I don’t see it as unreasonable. Besides, a lot of it falls under other guidelines regarding politics or flaming.

Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t think there is any hidden agenda, and by “dirty tricks” I mean the methods, not the intent. I wouldn’t waste my time here if I thought it was just an elaborate stage show.

Without knowing what metrics you are using it's pretty much impossible to suggest improvements. I learn the most from reading a respectful back-and-forth that goes on for a few responses and is not just both parties making a single statement.

One person's groupthink is another person's culture, after all.

I have long been able to talk about my medical situation here and my pursuit of unconventional treatment. Doing so elsewhere has been strongly discouraged by the moderating staff. I have never once had an HN mod tell me I need to quit talking about that here. It is the one and only discussion forum where I can have a real discussion about such things and not have it promptly turn into ugly drama, with the forum viciously ganging up on me and mods telling me it is my fault.

The moderation here has given me the opportunity to try to learn to discuss it constructively, in spite of the long history of extreme skepticism and open hostility my situation has received.

Given that many people have outright called me crazy and I have been banned from a few forums over it, I find it incredibly hard to believe that the moderation here has any agenda other than fostering a high bar for civility so that serious intellectual discourse can occur at all, in spite of it being openly on the world wide web and not a walled garden.

It's a really challenging thing to do. And if they were doing anything akin to what they are so often accused of, I think you would see a lot fewer of those accusations because everyone would live in fear of being banned for commenting on it.

If your idea of free speech includes name calling, no, you cannot do that here. The reason: allowing it kills the ability to genuinely have a free exchange of ideas and information.

I spent a lot of time working to fit in here. It did not come naturally to me and a previous handle of mine was rate limited at one time. But these sorts of accusations in no way fit with my experience of the space. I really hate seeing them, yet also recognize their very existence is evidence of how untrue they are.

Looks like we have no problems if you write to call attention to something that isn't normally thought about.

Many people cannot do this without getting emotional and insulting though.

Reddit and FB are largely algorithm-driven; in this joint, things get personal.

I enjoy the site as a news aggregator, but this place is an echo chamber.

And I don't comment all that much. Last month it was a comment every three days or so.

It made me think about the value of commenting for me and I decided to stop posting and lurk. Most of the value for me is in the lurking anyway.

You may have sent requests too quickly or something.