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Comment by kevlar1818 | Hacker News Reader

This is great! I have a feature request:

One thing that worries me about HN is that I've had a _link_ changed by a moderator in the past. And I don't mean removing query junk or changing between mobile/non-mobile sites -- I mean changing the link to an entirely different site. Even worse, by the time I noticed, I couldn't edit or delete my post (which I wanted to do because I disagreed with the new link). I was essentially forced to post content I didn't want to post! I think this is crosses the line from curation to impersonation.

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What was the link?

We change URLs every day, for lots of different reasons—for example if one article is mostly just copying from another source, or if users suggest a better URL. When we do that we nearly always post something saying what we did, and including the previous link:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

It was over a year ago I think. I can do some digging, but not right now.

If you find it, please email hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look. If we got something wrong, we're definitely interested in learning from that.

One such instance:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21378471

I remember commenting on a different article but the one that it points to now is a different article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384151

I checked the logs and you're right. The URL was originally https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/28/google-reportedly-in-talks.... That article is simply pointing to the Reuters source, so a moderator changed it in accordance with the site guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

Normally when we do that we explain so in the thread, like this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... But this one happened overnight when no one who is public as a moderator was awake. That's a flaw in the current moderation system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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