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Comment by davidbarker | Hacker News Reader

I used to visit Designer News daily, and became one of the mods. It was fun for a while, and surprisingly took more effort than I expected — I felt quite a lot of pressure to make the right decision when it came to downranking stories, banning users, etc.

Then, over time, it started to feel like the people higher up were less and less interested in the site, and no amount of moderation could fix some of the issues like the amount of spam.

I had a brief moment a couple of years ago where I went back to the site, cleaned up the spam and low quality posts I could find in the top few pages in the hope that it might kick off some kind of resurrection. It didn't, mainly because hardly anyone except spammers were posting to the site at that point.

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It definitely seems like there needs to be a vested financial interest, where a larger and highly profitable organization like YCombinator and its portfolio of companies, are willing to fund operating costs.

I feel for dang sometimes here on HN, it's far too much workload for a single individual - even with the crowdsourced mechanisms (which I don't think are designed well) to help facilitate his work managing the moderation of HN.

I think YC could afford to drop more $ on forum moderation to improve efforts, however the organization seems fairly conservative in nature, and HN has changed a lot in the last 3-5 years from where it was before that; and it's frowned upon in the rules to even mention what I believe is one of the primary factors for that, giving an overpowered weight to users to influence posts' and comment visibility who aren't necessary that critical in their thinking, are more reactive than responsive - and so I'm uncertain if or how many years it may take for the same concentration of higher quality conversations on the whole, relatively speaking from the past and now, to return.

> HN has changed a lot in the last 3-5 years from where it was before that; and it's frowned upon in the rules to even mention what I believe is one of the primary factors for that

Which rule? Pointing out suspected shills or complaints about bad use of down- and upvotes?

My understanding is that those rules are about specific complaints in the ongoing thread. Not a ban on discussing them in general?

Good question I suppose in need of clarification. Regardless I think not being able to comment or report an observation in a thread you're seeing a certain pattern on is problematic, and suppresses conversation of otherwise legitimate observations and concerns; where better to discuss an issue than where observations are being made?

I think the rule being put in place was because it was happening so much, which should be seen as a strong signal that there is a problem. But rather than fixing the problem or attempting to perhaps through experimentation, it's suppressed as much as possible so then the conservative status quo can continue at whatever externalized costs the people bringing it up have.

E.g. We should all know by now there are bad actors out there, even individual people, who maybe develop a grudge against a single user - and are more likely technically skilled enough to create and maintain a handful fo "real user" accounts on HN that would go undetected with whatever (if there are any) measures may be in place - who then may target one specific user; or industrial complexes who may have bot nets of 1000s or even 10,000s (or more) users to go relatively undetected, who then suppress certain types of comments if certain topics are mentioned, etc.

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