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> It's not wrong, of course, but it's been repeated for many years and won't lead to fresh conversation.

Assumes there are no new readers on HN and that everyone reads almost everything and nothing needs repeating. Also it's very 'no noobies' as if anyone who is anyone should know the ropes already. And that is not the case.

And I've mentioned this before a few times so I will repeat. Why don't you have in your profile that you are a moderator? How would someone new to HN know why you are saying what you are saying and why you have the right to pin what you say at the top?

I think you're underestimating the ability of HN readers to figure things out. Perhaps that is the answer to both questions.

For what it’s worth I agree with the parent comment. This is the only forum I’ve ever seen where moderators are not clearly labeled as such.

fwiw, it's just dang as far as I'm aware.

Curious are there other more significant differences?

But you never present how that’s a problem. You’d be succumbing to the ancient forum pastime of hypothetical rules/scenarios lawyering where you confuse the ability to invent a scenario (someone not knowing dang is a mod for 60seconds and that’s worth worrying about for unsaid reason) with the need to change the forum.

This equivalent of "RTFM" is a hostile percept for communication, as it implies that it is right to hide or obfuscate relevant information so that the speaker has less of a job to do when producing clear speech.

There are benefits to "RTFM". They may involve making sure there are shared assumptions during speech that allow further speech to be economized equitably between speaker and receiver. They may involve the internalization of the structure of a model so that they it be applied fluently in some practical setting. Your suggestion fails to satisfy either condition as the cost is either inequitable, or the benefit is irrelevant.

Putting a tag that says "moderator" next to a username is such a cheap quality of life improvement that even if what you claim is true, it really shouldn't be the job of the audience to figure anything out in the first place, as by comparison, it looks like a strong disfavor.

> it really shouldn't be the job of the audience to figure anything out in the first place

Words to avoid living by.

Things can be made endlessly complicated, or absolutely simple. So it's better to lean towards simplicity as one can converge towards minimal confusion.

Oh I don't agree. I think there are downsides to putting a 'mod' tag beside usernames, quite strong downsides actually, in addition to the upside that you guys are correctly noting. It's a tradeoff. I'm glad that I listened to my intuition 7 years ago (ack) when I became responsible for HN, and chose to trust the way things had always functioned here.

I don't see this as RTFM; there's no FM to begin with, other than perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

> Oh I don't agree. I think there are downsides to putting a 'mod' tag beside usernames, quite strong downsides actually

What are those 'downsides....quite strong downsides actually'?

It would change the feeling in the community. It would introduce barriers in communication that would make it harder to relate. It would fuck with the psychology of both moderators and non-moderators, the same way that uniforms do. It would turn the mods into abstractions/roles rather than human beings. It would infect HN with that priggish approach to authority which appeals to the smallminded and depresses creativity. It would signal lack of trust. It would demoralize any moderator who didn't have the soul of a meter maid.

To me, HN is not hostile toward new users. But part of what makes HN HN is it discourages behaviors new users might bring from elsewhere on the internet when those behaviors are disharmonious with the norms of the HN community. This is how new users acculturate into HN. Or how new users discover HN might not be for them. Or what might stay the determination that it is or isn’t.

HN hasn’t been turning into Reddit for a long while because sometimes the moderators make comments like this and the community goes “Okay” because they value the community and can see the moderator’s point and those matter more than typing something easy to type because it is all over Twitter.

More seriously, if HN’s moderation conflicts with your deeply held principles, HN might not be for you. Like any social media that makes someone unhappy, a voluntary break, temporary or complete, may be warranted.

HN is not going to suddenly become a democracy or collective. Moderation is a big part of what makes HN HN.

"As a nudge in that direction, I've...downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases)." - dang, master of HN

"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”

Honestly it's sad how people on this website are okay with this Maoist nonsense, considering how brutally they attack trends like censorship and political correctness.

HN is becoming more of an 'old boys club' day by day.

"I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases)."

that feels super gross, I love mostly passively reading HN, but manipulation like that because basically it sounds like you don't want to see stuff you've seen before ...

poor decision.

If you love reading HN, then you love the HN that includes us downweighting generic subthreads, because we've been doing that for years.

'Manipulation' and 'moderation' and 'curation' and so on refer to the same thing, just with different emotional valences. We're not trying to be manipulative per se, but it takes human attention to prevent the system from falling into its failure modes.

It would be wonderful (especially for us!) if community action plus software were all that was neeeded for an optimal solution, but sadly they're just not. There needs to be a third component: humans who pay attention to the site as a whole and jiggle it so it doesn't degenerate. That's what we mean by moderation.

When that third, human component is working well, it fades into the background and creates an impression that the system is regulating itself. That's a sort of paradise mode. But then when moderation shows up intrusively (as in my comment above), some readers feel like we're interfering with the system that exists. Actually we're already part of the system that exists, and if we weren't doing what we do, the whole system would be very different.

>Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place.

How downvotes encourage that? I mean it can be abused and is abused for bullying opinions that some people do not want to hear.

There are some interesting opinions reflecting exactly this "Curiosity likes diffs" that get downvoted and how it encourages to write something interesting if it will be invisible and become deleted anyway just because it's not in the trend or too different.

Or if I get downvoted for stating the facts I observe. In theory it should sparkle curiosity! Not shutting up the facts using downvotes. Once I've experienced getting downvoted for stating the facts it's not really encouraging to say what I think is really there.

Can we remove downvotes and leave only upvotes? Or can we limit downvotes to some degree so at least somewhere in the end of the threat you can still read them. I mean at leat let me read those downvoted opinions, it's not too comfortable to read almost white on white and it's annoying.

May be we can put a red line in the end of the thread and put some comments beyond that line to let know those have been downvoted a lot. But let me read those, at least we can learn why they have been downvoted.

I appreciate your work. Indeed HN is a unique place and supports curiosity to some good degree. I just wish it to encourage it more and I think people need some more safety for this.

I observe that if people want to say what they really think they just create temporary account just to express that specific opinion because new accounts are protected from downvotes as I understand. This observation should be worrying I think if we wish to encourage "diffs" and "unexpected".

For now I've learned that saying something really different here would get downvotes and this is not what I wish to learn here.

I wish to explore concepts that I am not sure are correct and I wish get answers helping me to explore them. Not downvotes that tell me mostly nothing about the concept.

Sorry, but I'm not clear on what downvotes have to do with this. Are you responding to what I said about downweighting? That just means that we lower the subthread's position on the page.

Downvotes hide your opinion if people do not like it.

It's not encouraging to write something different if it will be invisible/deleted anyway.

And if it's not because it wasn't accurate or good but because some people simply trying to shut up some facts/opinions then it's not encouraging to say something really different

This leads to say standard things that you 'know' will be supported.

That's an entirely different topic, but https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... has past explanations about it.

Have you considered something like [ROBOT 9000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Munroe#Other_projects) for HN? Not perfect, but it could be fun and a nice reminder to stay original.

> temporarily muting users who send messages that are identical to a message that has been sent to the channel before

We already check for strict duplicates but that's so strict a test that basically no post passes it. What would be needed is software to group the repetitive posts into equivalence classes but exempt the posts that are on the same topics but add some original twist. That seems hard for software! even with modern AI. I'd love to be proven wrong though. If anyone wants to take a crack at it, the data is all public.

You're the best dang!

I've seen a lot of otherwise reasonable threads get bogged down by "lowest common denominator" replies, especially ones that don't require reading the article and could really be posted in any thread matching the right keywords. Such comments are *really* easy to make and frequently do "well" in that they attract votes and comments, drowning out the rest of the discussion. Do you have ideas on how to combat this? Obviously moderator intervention would help, but it's not possible to be everywhere, especially in the first couple minutes of a post when the temptation to leave a lazy comment and the cost to the overall direction of discussion from such a comment is the greatest.

I do have an idea. It requires human intervention but there's no reason the humans have to be official moderators. My idea is to build software support for users (probably a subset of trusted users) to downweight generic subthreads the same way moderators currently do. In the meantime, if anyone notices such a thread they can simulate the same effect by emailing hn@ycombinator.com about it.

We already have software support for a subset of trusted users to do things like add years to titles. (If anyone wants to be incorporated into that set, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.) That was an experiment and it's worked out really well. I want to extend it and this is on the list of possible extensions.

Lolll. Dang is literally cringe. Signed up to reply to him, the message has been moved or deleted loll, so nevermind. Also not sure he realizes that nowadays half the "hn'ers" are just simple redditor; he keeps implying hners are somehow elite lol. Dog we are redditors, you live in your own world dang.

I don't know which message you're referring to but if you link to it, we can tell you what happened.

I don't think hners are elite? and yes, many people use both HN and Reddit - why shouldn't they?