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> Not saying dang never blocks users/comments, but it's exceedingly rare and I've only seen it for the most obnoxiously egregious behavior after (usually multiple) warnings.

Issuing warnings or reminding people of the guidelines (rules) is also part of being a moderator, so the moniker is perfectly cromulent to describe dang's role

I had never heard the word "cromulent" and so that led me to a Mirriam Webster article describing how The Simpsons made the word up for a joke and then from there "seeped into our lexical consciousness". Worth a read!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-does-cromulent...

It's way too good a word to be left unused! ;-) That whole episode is hilarious tbh

My issue isn't so much with the word, but it's that so often I see tons of users who are clearly bringing preconceived notions about how the moderator role works at Reddit and thinking it works the same here. At the very least there definitely aren't moderators, plural, on HN currently by that definition.

The other reason I think "admin" is a much better word is that it much more clearly indicates that this is a special, privileged role. That vast majority of "moderation" on HN is done by normal users with upvotes, downvotes and flagging (and also, of course, by automated systems e.g. with spam filters/bot detection).

But again, my primary point is that I see users blaming "the mods" for why their post is downvoted or hidden, when usually it's that people just don't want to acknowledge that the community, at large, didn't think they were contributing productively to the discourse of the site.

dang, or someone at HN, can and does silently modify the "weight" of a submission. That is why some articles stay on the front page longer, and some slip off the front page in a couple of hours.

This is far more control than reddit mods have. Reddit mods have one ability, an that is the ability to remove or not remove a submission, which is a very public action. HN can put its finger on the scales in a way that is much more subtle.

Very much so and it all happens with zero transparency, explanation or acknowledgement, very sus.

Your account can also be effectively shadowbanned with everything you submit going straight to the “dead” pile. Again no explanation and the only way you realize it is cause your submissions slowly die with no comments (and when you view the site in a non logged in fashion your submissions are not there)

That happens to spammers and serial abusers and, as I understand it, nobody else. People are overwhelmingly told when they're banned.

I've seen at least one user recently which has all his comments as [dead] automatically and they are pretty normal comments. I did not write down the name but I've seen that only once.

Assuming no violent (as in promoting) or particularly racist/sexist comments in their history, this hits some new accounts if they're using a VPN (some particular VPNs, I guess?). Sometimes they get caught up in the same filters used to block spammers/abusers from using HN. Or if their first (or one of their first) comments was a link without substantial text, that also gets people put into some kind of "spammer" category. You, or they if you tell them, can reach out through the email in the contact link at the bottom to get the ban addressed.

I found back the username in my browser history, the name is baybal2, it's a fairly old account so I'm not sure what caused it.

I'm going to contact the moderation indeed, it's the first time I was seeing non-spam comments being shadow banned automatically.

> so I'm not sure what caused it

The behaviour of the account holder.

You've found an odd edge-case. baybal2 is banned intentionally, despite the fact that most of his posts are good, and some are great. Unfortunately, the remainder aren't. The compromise is that he's banned, but users like me vouch for many of his good posts to make them visible. Here's a post from Dan about him a couple years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29692791. And another from 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898.

This could be because they got caught in a spam filter, or because we banned them and the comments they've posted since then are better. In such cases we're always happy to take a look and unban the account if they're using HN as intended.

There are some weird edge cases, like sometimes a banned user, once they're unbanned, will revert to posting abusively. Then we ban them again and they revert to posting good comments again. Who can fathom the psyche of homo internetus.

It's also common for an account to post both fine comments and abusive comments. It's the latter that determine whether we have to ban the account—that's how rule enforcement works. But if a banned account posts something good, there's no reason why the good post needs to remain [dead]. This is what vouching is for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch.

Thanks, I didn't know about vouching. I guess there's indeed an history behind each ban of a real user. (Not talking about spam of course, it's a different thing)

Sometimes the history is “your account was pretty new so when you posted something a lot of people didn’t like we assumed you were a troll, banned, and never looked again”.

There are, I believe, multiple HN moderators; Dan is just the only vocal one. And among all the different sites on the Internet, there are multiple different moderation styles, of which Dan's is just one.

I don't believe that is correct anymore, and I think TFA is right:

> Hacker News currently has one full time moderator: Dan Gackle (dang), and formerly Scott Bell (sctb). Their comment replies provide a pseudo-log of Hacker News moderation.

I've never seen an anyone else besides dang comment that they are an HN admin in the past 5-ish years or so.

Dan is the only one who currently posts publicly as a mod, but if you search his comments, you'll see he implies there are others.

> and I've only seen it for

Speculation/intuition, but I figure it happens in ways specifically designed to evade the type of detection you're basing your claim on, akin to shadow banning, whereas on Reddit there's often more visible evidence like corpses of deleted comments.

You can see all of those deleted/flagged comments if you turn on "showdead" in your options.

You can see the [dead] comments if you go to your profile and enable "showdead". Most of them are very bad, but from time to time you can find a false positive and vouch it.

Yes, I keep that enabled. I guess I provided poor examples but what I'm saying is that it seems like on Reddit moderation activities are quite obvious (i.e., a giant chain of deleted comments tends to indicate moderation and elicit resentment) and here they're less obvious (there's an air of strong moderation but little to point at directly, which is great IMHO as it evades resentment).