when they appeared here last time, i've written a negative comment about them
my comment was then pinned to the bottom of the page by super-mods, even-though it had the first spot with 30 upvotes
dang (HN moderator) has actually confirmed that my comment's ranking was manipulated, but declined to answer any further questions
We moderate HN threads less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the topic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). but 'less' does not mean we don't moderate at all. Until now we've moderated your comments much less than we would if you had been behaving this way about any other topic, but enough is enough.
Standard HN moderation practice, when users do this kind of thing, is to penalize and rate-limit their account. I'm going to do that now. (Edit: I changed my mind later. See the explanation below.) Since the reaction this will educe is predictable, I might as well answer it now: no, this has nothing to do with criticizing YC or YC startups. It's because you've been posting a plethora of low-quality off-topic comments and otherwise breaking the site guidelines. This is standard HN moderation and the only thing different in your case is how long we held off doing it.
Actually, IIRC, you're rather a good commenter apart from this, so if you want to fix this, it shouldn't be hard.
Edit:
For some reason I realized later that I didn't feel good about penalizing your account. It's not that what I said about standard moderation practice was wrong or anything—I just have a feeling that you're a good HN user coming from a good place and that there's probably a much better way to fix this. So I'm going to go with that instinct, and have removed the rate-limit etc.
I would feel similarly concerned if Twitter or Facebook moderated conversations on their partners or competitors by suggesting that some users weren't intellectually curious enough, or that they had entrenched positions, or that they were full of negativity, or that they weren't "fun" enough. In this perspective, judging a user by the aforementioned values seems to be the wrong tier of values for the stakes at play. I feel that community trust is what is at stake here.
Also, you have mentioned before how HN moderation is not secret. Is my account penalized in any way? Given that some users have been hellbanned before, I do feel uncomfortable with the degree of perceived transparency here. As a regular HN reader, it is not my expectation that users shall receive transparency when they are penalized.
One of my takeaways from this conversation with the user <ushakov> is that they were initially opaquely penalize, and that we would not have received clarity on this issue had you chosen not to personally respond.
Re your specific account: your votes are downweighted. We do that when an account has upvoted too many stories or comments that break the site guidelines—particularly the sensational-indignant type of post, which is by far the biggest problem on HN and therefore the thing we try to dampen and downweight in every way we know how. If you want to commit to upvoting fewer such comments and/or stories, we'd be happy to take that penalty off your account. Other than that your account isn't penalized.
Re transparency in general: that's a complex question. We take the following approach: we don't publish a full moderation log of every decision; we do answer specific questions when people have them. I'm not saying that's a perfect solution (it isn't, and we have ideas for making it better), but this is a super hard problem to get right. It's popular to argue "everything should all be completely transparent all the time" but having been at this job for a decade now I'm extremely wary of the unintended consequences that would have. I'll try to dig up some old links about that in case you or anyone cares. Edit: ok, there's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30141232 and a bunch more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27307075. If anyone reads those and has a question on this that I haven't already answered, I'd be happy to know what it is.
---
I've always been surprised when HN took moderation actions against my account, so it's hard for me to commit to not abusing when I don't have a clear mental compass about what is what. I just conduct myself in a way which aspires for personal authenticity in discussion.
I feel sad that the sum of my behavior on this forum is considered problematic and requires penalizing.
Re the penalty: I don't want you to be sad so I have removed it from your account. It's kind of hard to get into the details because we don't discuss specific vote data.
Here on HN, we have something absent everywhere else: A moderator who treats you as a person and spends time and energy to explain why something is the way it is. You may not agree with the reasoning all the times but almost everywhere else you don't get the reasoning and only the results(shadow ban, censorship, lock out).
Can I offer you something? If you believe that HN is not run fairly, collect the evidence and write a thorough article about it and post it here or on Reddit and other places. If you articulate your ideas properly and if you have a point I bet you will receive traction and response from YC people.
HN is their marketing asset
otherwise how is it possible that a niche product of a YC company right now has the first spot with 400 upvotes?
I for one upvoted because this genuinely seemed like an interesting feature. It's clearly hitting a pain point for me as a developer, whether or not it actually ends up solving it satisfactorily.
> There are no down arrows on stories. They appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold, but never on direct replies.
The commenter here's upvote counted, my downvote did not count.
And I won't just use any other available form of attack like falsely accusing the post of some wrongdoing just because I want to criticise something and that's the only way to do it.
I did leave a critical comment but that is a seperate issue because you can leave a positive comment and upvote. So the ability to comment nulls out.
It's not a secret that YC startups get promoted and placed on the hackernews frontpage. If I remember correctly it looks different than this, so what exactly are you accusing them off? Using a hidden promotion mechanism instead of the known and accepted one? That makes no sense to me! If they have the ability to promote YC startups on the frontpage and it's generally known and not done in secret, why should they do it in secret here?
I think it legitimately got upvoted here. Maybe with some friends&family help. But not by some hidden moderator action.
I certainly found it interesting, but I would also never use a tool that privacy-violating.
why are so many people upvoting but only so little commenting? how is it that only a minority commented positively the product?
this isn’t like a typical #1 post
makes you suspicious doesn’t it?
We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are the story*, but 'less' does not mean 'not at all'. When users turn threads into shitshows with false accusations and off-topic drama, we have to do something about that, YC or no.
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
look at posting history of Fig, always the front page, always the hot spot
work for free for HN?
As Dang said in comment you linked: “That's no fun and does nothing for the community.”.
but
the reason i've got angry is because the original comment i made was moved to the very last position
not by downvoting, but by undemocratic rulers of HN
the angry comments in thread came after that accident happened
No, not everyone wants an ideological free-for-all.
If it's valid to criticise a critic, it must also be valid to criticise a critic critic.
The merits of a given argument or action do not rest on "because daddy said so". There is and must be a daddy, but no daddy is above critique themselves even though their job is to moderate others.
IIRC, the downweight was correct in principle, because the subthread wasn't about the particular story, it was just a generic complaint about the general topic. We want those downweighted because, regardless of topic, they have a strong tendency to sit at the top of a thread, accumulating upvotes and choking out more specific and more interesting discussion.
It was a mistake to downweight it, though—not because the subthread was good, but because the topic was a YC startup. By far the most important rule of HN moderation is that we intervene less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the topic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
The user who did the downweighting didn't know that Fig was a YC startup, so it was an honest mistake. Certainly none of this has to do with trying to suppress criticism of YC or YC-funded companies. We know how to take our lumps and do so all the time. We also know that community good will is the only value that HN actually has, so doing anything to jeopardize that would be really dumb.
really? any examples you can share?
I'm all for keeping Rust discussions fun and curious.
sometimes you can get 2, 3, 5 times more upvotes than another post in half the time, if some HN admin/mod don't like your post then it's artificially ""downvoted"" and leave the front page(s)
he's right to be angry and hostile
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
The problem appear to be people have a high expectation from HN. People think that HN to be a discussion platform. But it is actually a PR platform implemented via a discussion forum.
Understand that and you ll have no trouble.
just imagine how much of the HN comment section is manipulated by these elites
i guess some YC-investor isn't happy that us regulars are devaluing his investment and downranks negative comments so that people will give Fig a try after reading bunch of good ones
I don't think this is the proper use of the word. These are just people with vested interest in making a product more popular - it has nothing to do with any "elite."
"a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society."
the people who downranked my comments, were indeed elites, because they're a select group of privileged users with the ability to downrank
millions visit HackerNews every day
when those people see Fig ad here, first thing they do is check what the people are saying about it in the comment section
now, imagine that instead of real feedback, you're mostly seeing cherry-picked comments praising the product
it certainly shapes your opinion of the product and makes you more likely to try
I don't know why you are 'a regular' if you have such a toxic opinion of and attitude towards HN.
Also although this is not going to sway you, I at least want to mention it as I found it interesting when I came across this - see the response and embedded search link in the FAQ question "Are negative stories about YC suppressed on HN?" here [1]
Edit: also want to note that I'm thankful for you and others who bring up the privacy issues because I likely would have looked at the fig.io page, thought 'hey this looks cool' and upvoted the post without thinking much further... which is likely where a lot of the upvotes come from. So IMO putting things more lightly (even in your original response 9 days ago) would have sufficed. Perhaps if you had qualified what you meant by fig relying on "free labour" (it just sounds like a hectic accusation) your comment would have stayed at the top. Though overall I agree it doesn't seem like the kind of comment that should have been suppressed and it's good to push back against that a bit.
Most lurkers and users think YC companies make it to the front page organically and based on merit alone.
Other than that, YC companies have to compete for attention on HN along with everyone else, and I can tell you that most find it maddeningly difficult.
In some ways we use moderation power to YC startups' disadvantage - we moderate criticisms of YC startups less, not more, than usual (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
For example, the tedious angry-generic-repetitive sort of subthread that tends to get upvoted on most common topics is exactly the kind of thing we downweight as part of standard moderation, but we do that less when a YC startup is the topic. That's not because such discussion is any higher-quality in those cases (it isn't), but rather because people are quick to jump to the conclusion that we're doing nefarious things and we need to be able to answer those concerns in good conscience.
The fact that there's all this drama about one such subthread having gotten downweighted is actually an indication of how we don't do that. It happened, but only by mistake.
But if some users can down-weight comments and that happens on a thread about a YC company, I hope you can see why it would raise some concerns. I personally didn’t know some users had this ability.
It doesn't work perfectly though—the system is just too complex. In the case we're talking about, the user (not mod) who downweighted the comment was quite aware of both those rules and of their precedence. They just didn't know that Fig was a YC startup. There are thousands of YC startups and people can't remember them all.
Since mistakes are inevitable, I think all we can do is be open when they happen, fix them if we can, and explain our general principles are. That's what I've been trying to do in this case, and if there's a question I haven't answered yet, I'd be happy to. None of this is secret.
Actually the dream would be to have a community system that could regulate itself without any such special moderation, and the experiments I described upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227642) are all about inching in that direction, but it's just a hard problem that we have no general solution for.
This is the first time I've seen something like this on HN though, so if anything it might show how good the HN policies normally are. I just wasn't aware that some members of the community are more equal than others; now that it is clear and communicated, I can make better decisions myself.
The intention is to try to inch in the direction of a more self-regulating community while improving the quality of the discussions. Improved discussion quality is by far the most important thing and as far as I can tell this experiment is a big success in that department, so the essence of the HN is definitely not being diluted by it. If it were, we'd stop it immediately.
Not sure if that helps or not!
Edit: if anyone wants to see a typical example, here's a top subthread that one of the users we're talking about correctly marked as offtopic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31231858. That's the kind of pointless flamewar stuff that tends to get stuck at the top of a page. Downweighting it makes everything better, and having more eyeballs out there to catch it sooner is super helpful. That's the intention behind this experiment.
For example, it used to be that only moderators could unkill a [dead] post and restore it to full visibility. Then we started an experiment in letting non-moderators do that, and this turned into the 'vouch' feature which allows most HN users above a certain karma threshold to have a say in which posts get unkilled. That was the biggest success to date - it has made a big difference both in thread quality (many interesting comments become visible) and community happiness (there's less resentment about posts being dead than there used to be).
That was a great outcome, and we're always thinking about more possibilities for such things. The current experiment is very much in the same spirit. Personally I would love to find ways to extend these things to everyone (most likely above a certain karma threshold) but it's not often obvious how to do that.
Another example is the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), which gives submissions a random placement on HN's front page.
Also, I tried fig the first time round and was not impressed.
> Not sure if I can disclose further than that.
how hypocrite of you to confirm you know more, but don't want to give out any information
why are you confirming then?
You have a very curious definition of super-mod. One would assume a super-mod needs to be a mod first.
> confirm you know more, but don't want to give out any information
People are sometimes entrusted with non-public information they aren’t at liberty to disclose, at least without asking for explicit permission first. Still, when they see false accusations thrown around they sometimes would like to do something. I thought this is a forum for adults, that much should be obvious.
what matters is that there's a selected group of users, who can leverage capabilities unavailable and unknown to anybody else in the group
again, if you won't be disclosing any info, why do you mention that you have anything to disclose?
They've said enough, and there simply are situations where that's all you can say, and it's neither pointless nor wrong, nor even unusual or all that remarkable. It's common even.
maybe it’s just 5 people, who knows?
holy cow
The details would be even better, but I can think of at least a few ways a person might become aware of a fact like that without being able or morally obligated to disclose more than that heads-up, and without even themselves having necessarily ever done anything wrong.
It's not the DaVinci code.
> without the involvement of a “super-mod” or anyone affiliated with YC.
Being flagged / downvoted by users isn't "manipulated", that's just how a upvote / downvote based website works. The comment was likely downvoted because it was just plain out wrong as the first comment to your post already says.
> YC companies get tips and notifications when they're about to get featured
> We don't.
you're missing the point!
the comment wasn't flagged and it wasn't downvoted
in fact the opposite is true as it has 30 upvotes, upvoted by regular users like you
the comment was downranked, so it only appears lower on the page
this feature isn't available for regular users, only for an elite group
No, the point is that it was downvoted / downranked / flagged because it was a low quality comment that is spreading FUD and it doesn't matter who did it.
why isn't HN respecting user's opinions and manipulating the positions as they wish?
Because certain comments can be quite agreeable, but don't encourage interesting discussions. Your particular thread had more discussion about bitterness and etiquette than content. Even though your points are valid that's not the kind of discussion one wants to have at the top of any article.
Derailing the comment section about this article with your own agenda isn't particularly helpful either. But at least I appreciate that I now know about that feature.
but what happened though is that it wasn't legitimately downvoted, it was moved down the page
check my history, i didn't get 5000 points for posting "inflammatory, wrong, inciteful, off-topic, meta, or similar content" did i?
I checked the post in question at your request, and to be honest they way I read it is a bit off topic picking fights or meta discussion around the politics of HN. I read it as a bit inflammatory as well. Some of your responses here seem kind of similar, maybe you’re experiencing it differently but it seems like you are angrily responding to almost every branch of the threads here. But that’s all just my personal opinion of what I’m seeing.
Since HN's mandate is not to be that, we have to have countervailing mechanisms to compensate for that weakness. Otherwise the system would get stuck in one of its failure modes. The countervailing mechanisms include things like flags, software mechanisms (including automated up- and down-weights) and moderation (including manual downweights and other interventions). All this is happening all the time. If it weren't, HN would be a completely different place.
None of this is secret; it's not all transparent in the sense that we don't publish a full moderation log of all the factors, but we're happy to answer specific questions.
Just to be clear: I don't think there is anything outrageous about such a system. It's probably positive for the community.
my comment was on-topic and had valid points contributing to the discussion
the generic/offtopic is just a cover up
in fact why don't we just downrank your comment right here and mark it as generic or maybe off-topic? /s
We cut users a lot more slack when they're making shit up about HN, YC, YC startups, and so on, but the amount of slack we cut is nonetheless finite and it's time you stopped.
Lest we hear more about how you're being repressed: people criticize HN, YC, and YC startups all the time here with zero problems. You, however, have derailed more than one discussion now by inundating it with dozens of sensational, false, and/or offtopic comments. That is not what HN threads are for, and even though we moderate HN less when YC startups are the topic, we eventually have to draw a line.
Actually I have the impression that you're rather a good commenter in general and this isn't personal in any way, so if you want to fix this, it won't be hard.
Did you even read the comment?
> even-though it had the first spot with 30 upvotes
The comment had upvotes and a mod confirmed that the ranking was later manipulated, meaning it didn't lose ranking because of down votes.
My lord, it's one think when people just read article titles and skip the actual article, but it's incredibly immature and perplexing when people just read the first line of a comment!
Please don't jump to criticism and read the things properly, if not, try to refrain from commenting .