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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I think it's clear to everyone how the mediums are different. What's not clear is how subjective decisions CNN makes about what to air are acceptable, but subjective decisions HN makes about what to allow on the front page aren't.

What's especially weird about this argument is that the US media market is in fact in the middle of a giant debate about how acceptable CNN and Fox News's editorial decisions are. It's not like it's a reach to get from moderation to CNN's editorial decisions; it's a pretty obvious comparison.

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Thank you, I understand where you're coming from now. Let me clarify.

The difference is because CNN makes a subjective editorial decision about what to air. Their content is curated and prepared by paid staff. The success of CNN is entirely built on the talent and hard work of these people. There's a whole side discussion about the ethical responsibilities of CNN we can have, but let's set that aside and just distinguish them from HN.

HN's success is built on its community. The overwhelming majority of submissions are user contributions - far less than 1 in 1000 HN posts are written by the mods, and they're generally meta posts. HN owes the success of its content to the community, and such I feel that they're morally obligated to treat that community with a certain level of respect. Part of that is everything I've argued for today - well-defined rules that are enforced equally and transparent moderation.

I'm not invested in CNN. I haven't participated in the formation or success of their "community", if you could even call it that. But I, and many others, have participated in the success of Hacker News by submitting articles, Show HNs, etc - and participating in discussions on the site. HN would be nothing without the community that participates in it, and frankly I think YCombinator's core business itself would be measurably worse off without HN.

Since the HN community is responsible for HN's success, I say we can call for transparent moderation.

I don't question your ability to call for it, but I don't think it's realistic to expect it. HN is built on a whole lot of user participation, but YC has also spent millions of actual dollars keeping it running, maintained, and moderated. It belongs to them, not to us.

Your recourse, if you don't like how they're managing it, is to start your own site, or to move to a different site. Indeed, if value on HN primarily comes from its users, as you say, it's hard to imagine a more powerful recourse to have.

Tangentially, I think HN's value to YC is hugely overblown. YC has been privately telling batch companies not to participate here for almost the whole time the site has existed. The fundamental key to YC's success is being first to fully commit to a market for small investments in marginal startups. It was an extremely good investment thesis, and it compounds dramatically every year as the value of the alumni network increases.

YC could kill off HN tomorrow and it is unlikely it would harm their returns at all. If you're not close to SFBA tech company investing it's easy to miss the extent to which YC is currently running the table on small startup investing, and none of that has anything to do with how HN is moderated.

They have literally had laws enforcing fairness in media.

Fox news is heavily criticized for their biased reporting and editorial standards. That would be the comparison to criticism of HN modding policies.

Those rules were unconstitutional and revoked.

The fairness doctrine was not found to be unconstitutional.

I believe you're incorrect about that.

I'm not.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/everyth...

> A lawsuit challenging the doctrine on First Amendment grounds, Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission , reached the Supreme Court in 1969. The Court ruled unanimously that while broadcasters have First Amendment speech rights, the fact that the spectrum is owned by the government and merely leased to broadcasters gives the FCC the right to regulate news content.

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