I think Popehat is great, sometimes, but I also like HN's anti-snark guidelines because it brings the conversation up a level. Would I have made the same choice as dang today? Maybe not. Do I appreciate his transparency? Yes. Do I agree that it fits with the site guidelines? Yes.
As for the comments... I've read them a few times throughout the day. And lemme tell ya, folks are rarely responding to the Popehat article. But, given that the Popehat article was essentially a bunch of links to other articles after a couple of snarky paragraphs framing the issue, that's not too bad. At least one dead comment was griping about Popehat. Womp womp.
Was the change made without the explicit consent of every user? Um... Yes. But what entitles us to that level of control over HN? This isn't a direct democracy, it's a news aggregator. This site also allows us to edit our comments, without the explicit consent of every person who responds to them.
Would it be appropriate to sue HN into oblivion over this? Please, oh please, no.
What entitles you to that level of control over email? If any of the emails you sent were modified by Google, you would be outraged, but we should just accept "editorial control" over Twitter, Facebook, HN, etc.?
I think that's the real debate happening here. It's not just about censorship, it's about exercising control over the content. Many feel strongly that this sort of control should be in the hands of the creators of that content, not editors/moderators/site owners/etc.
> This site also allows us to edit our comments, without the explicit consent of every person who responds to them.
I would be ok if the person who originally submitted the article made that change himself and there was a history associated with the submission that showed the change. That's the creator exercising control.
> This isn't a direct democracy, it's a news aggregator.
It's kind of acting like a newspaper though? If content is being edited, that's the job of an editor. I don't think it's such a far stretch to imagine top comments being edited to improve the conversation, etc. at that point, what's the distinction with a newspaper?
In the couple of years that I've been here, I can only recall one instance of dang editing somebody's comment. He explained precisely what was changed, it was because a typo or something was causing the conversation to go sideways, it was after the edit window had closed, and the author thanked him for making the correction. As far as I can tell, the site maintainers are quite committed to transparency of that kind.
Maybe a "history" feature would be nice. OTOH, I appreciate that HN takes a very slow and deliberate approach to adding features to the site. Personally speaking, most social media crashes my phone browser, and HN is beautiful in its simplicity.
> It's kind of acting like a newspaper though?
If newspapers have live comments sections and don't contain the text of a vast majority of their stories... um, no. This isn't at all like a newspaper.
We usually post in the thread that we changed the URL and/or title and trust readers to be smart enough to figure it out. Some cases are worse than others, and in some of those I'll add replies to particular subthreads explaining that they were posted before the URL or title was changed.