Hacker News Reader

Comment by sgift | Hacker News Reader

From Dans explanation in the post:

> We downweight posts in response to things that go against the site guidelines, such as when a submission is unsubstantive, baity or sensational.

So, this is what's happening already.

View on HN

Notice how subjective those descriptors are. It's been very clear in the past that moderator intervention is rampant for articles / posts that merely strike a raw nerve.

If they were objective they could be automated. The whole reason for manual moderation is that this is not possible.

Yep, they are subjective. That's what I want. I want the HN mods to curate the content based on those guidelines. It's what makes this site worth coming to.

I'm willing a optimize for precision over recall here.

> "Yep, they are subjective. That's what I want. I want the HN mods to curate the content based on those guidelines. It's what makes this site worth coming to."

Agreed. If you try to make something more prescriptive then you end up with a massive increase in bureaucracy as you try to categorise every kind of content and every type of way of presenting that content. Effectively you turn moderators into lawyers and judges.

Oh, good to know. Guess we don't need any kind of logging system for that, we'll just take it at face value - I'm sure there are absolutely no other reasons that mods would downweight posts, so that's just great. /s

If you don't trust the moderators' word, why would you trust their logs?

I wouldn't - see the recent spez shit over on Reddit.

Would be nice if we could have a discussion on it instead of just saying it's impossible though - is this a community of hackers or just apologists?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com