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Comment by altairprime | Hacker News Reader

What is it if the information is freely available, to anyone asking, for a single domain they are trying to post at that time?

It’s not secret, because they’ll be provided an answer if they email the mod team.

It’s not free as in open source, because it isn’t available for anyone to download and study in full.

So, since it’s not secret, is it public, or private? Since it’s not published in full but any query of LIMIT 1 is answered, is that open, closed, or other?

Restrictions to publication don’t necessarily equate to secrecy, but the best I’ve got is “available upon request”, which isn’t quite right either. Suggestions welcome.

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Content moderation systems often hide mod actions from the content author [1]. That's a secret.

The opposite would be to show the author of the content some indicator that it's been removed, and I would call that transparent or disclosed moderation.

Interestingly, your comment first appeared to me as "* * *" with no author [2]. I wonder if that is some kind of ban.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e6BIkKBZpg

[2] https://i.imgur.com/oGnXc6W.png

edit I know you commented again but it's got that "* * *" thing again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130675

https://archive.is/Eov7z

It's not a ban. It appears when the user has 'delay' in their profile set to N minutes and N minutes haven't elapsed yet. We should probably make this more explicit.

Re the 'delay' setting see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!

There’s a protection system in place that can result in that; I don’t have the details at hand (since I’m not associated with HN/YC) but I remember seeing it once before on a highly contentious post, and an email to the mods helped explain/correct whatever was up.

> Suggestions welcome

"This domain is not allowed on HN" as an error message upon submission.

That’s not going to work, because now that’s an API for spammers to bulk process against a domain list. The only available API must be human communication to the mod team, or the spammers will overcome it with automation.

Spammers can already do that API call and see if the domain shows up. This only puts human users at the same level of consideration as spammer automation.

Seriously dedicated spammers can, yes! But antispam is about reducing the noise threshold, and eliminating low-effort spam opportunities that can be done to a single HTTP endpoint with a bash script is a big win. Simply having to access two pages is already too much to bother with for the vast majority.

That's trivial to figure out.

It's quite possible the reason the list isn't public is because it would give away information about what thought is allowed and what thought isn't.

> That’s trivial to figure out.

Elaborate.

That encourages switching to another domain for spammy submissions.

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