This is going to fall off the front page very quickly, just watch. The mods suppress anything that makes YC or anything they invest in look bad
It looks like a mod downweighted this story but also saved it, along with your comment, for me to review. Since the rule is the rule, I'm reducing the downweight now. (Edit: I've since checked with the mod and indeed their intention was to follow the same rule - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40720026.)
This looks like a flimsy story from a couple of months ago about something from many years ago. It's hard to tell if there's any there-there but, given how this sort of story usually works, the odds seem low*. It's obviously getting attention not because of intellectual curiosity (the right reason on HN) but because of celebrity outrage (a popular human pastime but not the right reason on HN). It's also repetitive of many other outrage threads we've had in recent months—an additional reason to downweight it (beyond the outrage aspect). We never let articles like this stay on HN's frontpage normally—if we did, HN would consist of little else.
Still, I'm happy to reduce the downweight on this because that rule is key to the trust we have with the bulk of the community. I think most HN readers know that we moderate shallow outrage stories off the front page, and why; and I think most can appreciate that we bend that rule the other way for the sake of the above principle, even if they don't like it.
It doesn't stop people from making up false claims (edit: I mean about HN moderation, like the parent comment), but it does let us answer them in good conscience, and the rest is just standard internet dynamics (sinister speculation, etc.)
* Note the photo that describes Geoff as YC's "new president". That hasn't been the case for 5 years, and he stopped being president 18 months ago.
Do you think there will ever be in band signaling of when (or perhaps even why) a post was artificially depressed by moderation? Particularly aimed at cases where people are already using tools like https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=40710417 on posts like this where more people have already seen the story drop off and confirmation that it was via moderation than will probably ever see this comment in its later revival explaining how or why. Something like a "downed" with hover alt text next to the flag tag even. Apart from being immediately clearer to everyone without waiting for a comment/email that helps solidify against "and then 5 hours later they back tracked it slightly but not all the way with some other excuse why after being called out" type thinking/arguments. I mean you'll never get rid of that completely but it's a lot more powerful that the message existed there at T=30 minutes than T=5 hours.
Would typically email but this seemed like something good for an open message :).
I'm tired and doubtful that I've expressed this very well, but I've posted quite a bit about this over the years, so if the present comment doesn't help, perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 will, or one of the other comments linked back from there.
Specifically on a full moderation log your links also show how it would be troublesome in some ways I perhaps hadn't thought as deeply about. After all even if you moderate 9999 things right the same crowd is going to want to parade the 1 - now with more details as to why. At the same time I still think the same set of people are going to complain either way and the data isn't really helpful to them as much as the rest of the people anyways. I realize I'm extraordinarily unlikely to budge your views on this due to volume of experience/thought/interaction with this topic you've had but just count me in the selfish "I'd rather the log/actions were public for us average user and then your half a day of emailing was explaining the details to the troublesome bunch rather than with the average user spending time trying to understand".
I'll close with a smaller push of "and even if the site never does a full moderation log, not signaling moderated post/comment actions at any level only feeds that small group on believing everything unpopular they say is being censored 100% of the time instead of x% of the time". With that I'll leave you some peace on the matter :). Thanks for the time and reading through (yet another) user's view on this and for the good moderation of the site as always.
I agree with you that the important thing is not to satisfy the litigious sort of internet user—the ones who take every explanation as fodder for fresh objections. It would be nice, of course, if they would take yes for an answer! and on rare occasions I've managed to pull it off, but it's hard, and ultimately too high a bar.
The important thing to satisfy the "rest of the community", as you put it. But the rest of the community seems to me already satisfied. Adding a new system like a moderation log wouldn't add to their satisfaction and might even diminish it.
I don't mean this in a complacent way! It has not always been the case that the "rest of the community" was more or less satisfied, and it took years to figure out how to get there. But we did figure it out (more or less), and the approach has been stable for a long time now. It boils down to this: we answer questions when people ask them, take their concerns seriously, and acknowledge and correct mistakes when we screw up. Because we do so much of this (I spend the bulk of my time doing it, many days), regular users eventually see repeated cases of it, and this lets them know that if they ever have a concern, a question, or just a curiosity, they can get an answer too.
This turned out to be by far the biggest factor in getting the HN system (community + mods + software) to be more self-regulating. What was lacking before that (mainly because pg didn't have time) was responsive, interactive moderation. It's important to understand that this is not a technical solution (like a moderation log). What makes things work better is human interaction, there's no substitute for that, and we're already doing quite a lot of it.
No, if it looks to them like many/most/all of those posts have been more or less subtly de-emphasized, the impression they'll get is the exact opposite of what you postulate.
The intention was to downweight it enough that it wouldn't be near the top of the front page but not so much that it would leave the front page. That's the same thing I would have done, btw.
It looks like what happened was that more user flags came in and that, together with the moderation downweight, moved the story off the front page. Eventually we noticed this and restored it to the lower part of the front page, which is the standard practice for stories of this kind, which we'd never allow to be on HN's front page if they were about anybody else. (Though, as someone pointed out to me, this story wasn't negative about YC.)
Not at all. The source links the relevant SEC filing.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1849056/000110465921...
On page 111 the false claim is plainly visible:
“ Prior to joining OpenAI, Mr. Altman served as President of Y Combinator from February 2014 until March 2019. Mr. Altman currently serves as the Chairman of the board of directors of Y Combinator.”
There is also a screenshot in the Business Times story showing the false claim was visible on the AltC website in April. You can go to the AltC site and confirm that Sam is CEO.
The story also includes comment from YC confirming that Sam was never chairman after it was announced he would be.
Dang, what is the basis for your comments on this story? The San Francisco Business Times has been a reliable and fairly pro business local source for years. Hardly tabloid journalism. Can you specify and explain one of the “false claims” you allege?
My comment originally included that explicitly, but I was trying to edit it down a bit and thought this would be clear from the context. Since it wasn't, I've added an edit there now.
One can hardly call it the exact opposite of the truth if the feared downweighting of this post actually happened.
It's commendable that it was corrected and that you are attempting to be transparent. But, it sure creates the appearance of a self-protective attempt to moderate.
Different mods inevitably make different calls sometimes, though. That doesn't change the fundamental practice, which has been stable for a long time (long before I took over HN long ago).
One thing I often point out in these situations is that "moderate less" (which is what the rule calls for) is not the same thing as "not moderating at all". Most probably the mod in this case was thinking along the lines of "I'm still moderating less in this case than we normally would, but I'll check with dang just in case".
"Here's me obediently following the rule (Oh, the world is so full of silly rules!), but let me editorialise a bit on why any story about how Sam Altman isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread should be disregarded..."
And you don't see how that undermines any "trust we have with the bulk of the community"?
The reason I post such long explanations when a case like this comes up is not because I think it will satisfy the disgruntled, chronically distrustful fraction of users (though that would be nice!) but because I know that explaining everything that happened, and why, is enough to reassure the bulk of the community.
(I wrote a bit more about this here if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40720410)
It rather obviously does, AFAICS -- would we be having this discussion if it didn't? ;-)
> The reason I post such long
The issue for me certainly isn't the length, but the tone (or "whiff" :-) of your comments.
> explanations when a case like this comes up is not because I think it will satisfy the disgruntled, chronically distrustful fraction of users (though that would be nice!)
Hope I don't count among those. I've been a bit vocally critical recently, but that's just (at least intended as) pointing out where you slip up in your stated goals and policies, which on the whole I'm fairly certain you (all) are doing a pretty good job at.
> but because I know that explaining everything that happened, and why, is enough to reassure the bulk of the community.
OK, so I'm apparently not in that bulk. Hope there's some "moderately sceptical" group between that bulk and your "disgruntled, chronically distrustful fraction" above for me to be counted in.
Of course I'd rather satisfy even more users, but it's hard to figure out how to do that at scale. For one thing, i's not monotonic: making changes to satisfy class X can easily dissatisfy class Y, and then it's unclear if we're worse off or better; probably worse.
That applies in cases like the current thread, btw. I believe the majority of HN readers would find HN less satisfying if flamebait were more prominent on the site. People come here to get away from all that, to find new and (above all) interesting things they haven't seen before. Doing our best to clear away the less intellectually-curious stuff (riler-uppers, mountain-from-molehill clickbait, tawdry drama and so on) helps keep a large part, and actually the more valuable part, of the audience here. It would be foolish to trade that away in the hope of winning over the bitter contingent who, though vocal and prolific, are a tiny sliver of the community. Especially since attempting to win them over would likely be futile. I know, because I've tried—hard and for years.
The conflict-of-interest concern is a real one, of course, and the solution to that is the rule I've been explaining elsewhere in the thread (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). It does the job fine and has held up well. It doesn't satisfy everyone, but the users it doesn't are probably unsatisfiable anyhow; and it reduces the risk of alienating the ones who are here for the right reason (to read interesting things).
> Hope I don't count among those.
Don't worry, we're good! But I appreciate you adding those bits because it's not always easy to tell where people are coming from.
I should say one other thing: criticism is fine, I'm happy to do my best to answer it, and critical users have their place. Even the users (not talking about you here!) who are mad about something we did or didn't do 10 years ago and show up at every opportunity with garish accusations—even they have their place...though they're not necessarily the easiest to relate to.