We take care of these requests every day and have bent over backwards (e.g. spending hours writing code) to help people individually in cases where their needs were unusually complex. I can tell you for sure that whether the person is high- or low-status in $whoever's eyes has nothing to do with this. Often I don't even know who the person is.
Our approach boils down to this: we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. It doesn't matter who the "anyone" is. Countless times I've deleted posts, redacted personal data and/or randomized usernames for accounts that had long been abusing and trolling HN. I don't rub their nose in it—I just pretend not to have noticed. You'd be surprised how polite and thankful people become when they need something.
I'm not surprised to see accounts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732721 being scurrilously silly, but you've been around here long enough to know better.
Edit: here's the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343. It's a more complete explanation than I have time to give right now, and nothing has changed since then.
That doesn't mean we don't care about protecting users with privacy and other concerns—we certainly do, and like I said we take care of these every day. We just try to do it with more precise tools than wholesale deletion.
It's fundamentally a tradeoff: we're trying to balance the community interests of a public forum with the need to protect individuals. There's no perfect answer, but we're committed to both sides of it. Of the people who ask us for these things, well over 90% end up satisfied. Probably over 99%, but I don't want to make claims I'm not sure of!
Now you’re active participant in a cover up. They want to delete something, edit something? Fine. The controls are there. Everyone knows that. But that’s not what this is. This is taking extraordinary action to gaslight and coverup. That’s what’s trash. It’s the secrecy. It’s changing of the archive. That’s what trash.
In all my decades of dealing with public forums, I have never seen this as something done in a reputable forum, outside of a court order.
It’s a betrayal of trust. The fact that you’re not defending it on the merits, but rather that it’s supposedly open to all that knew about the secret door is just the chef’s kiss of abuse of power. If I was asked to do this, I would quit.
Dang, every time you do this, it shows contempt to everyone on this forum. It’s absolute trash. It is bad, and you should feel bad. But of course, you don’t feel bad about doing it. You feel good about it.
Is gnabgib an actual moderator here or did he made a bot account that does regex matching to some words to try to do backseat moderating to farm points?
His account made numerous robotic comments that missed the key context which a human would not have missed.
p.s. I'm not the sole moderator here, fortunately—just the only one who posts publicly.
I have seen a lot of selective application of HN rules over the (many) years. My 2 cents.
We try not to delete posts that got replies, because doing so would be unfair to the other commenters in the thread. What I've done so far is reassign it to a random user ID, so it's as if you'd used a throwaway account to post it and there's no link to your main account. Does that work?
I’ve literally never felt the need to request a change, even though I’ve written a bunch of boneheaded stuff.
We do get occasional corporate takedown requests, often from the lawyers of someone who noticed that someone said a bad thing about their company (or occasionally themselves) on HN years ago. But I try to do less in cases where we're not hearing from an HN user directly, and least of all when they lead with a stick (e.g. legal threats). I do check with YC's legal people though, but they love HN and totally get it and are on the community's side.
That’s hilarious, and a look behind the curtain I didn’t expect to get when making this post.
It does leave the question of why, but I cannot begin to imagine either.
But there are vastly more important factors. One is that there are other moderators. They just don't post publicly.
By far the most important is HN's community. We have so many dedicated users who care about the quality of this place, and they send a steady stream of heads-ups about things we need to look at*. That's the reason for your "god mod" impression—it would be impossible for one person, or even a team, to see all these things, but what I'm actually looking at are things that other people have seen and are bringing to our/my attention, whether by flagging them or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. So it's a "given enough eyeballs" thing.
We can always use more such help, so if you (or anyone) notice something that we should probably be looking at, please flag it and/or email hn@ycombinator.com. We usually can look at it pretty quickly—though it may take me longer to reply and my worst-case latency is shameful.
* For example, I've got 3 or 4 emails at present asking about why "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mataroa.blog) has been posted 14 times and keeps getting flagged. Yeah, that's probably something we should look at.
Really cool! How different is Arc running HN or your extension from Arc3.1, the last-released version?
At the language level, we've changed things but not super much. It's maybe 30% different.
At the application level there have been many changes and it's more like 80% different.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11240350 has discussion of one change we made to Arc, though it's already 8 years old - the midpoint between today and the original release of Arc, I guess.
While technically being against the ‘rule’ against editorializing titles, I guess in this case it was to make it less sensational xD
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's always interesting to to me that although the rule cuts both ways, people only tend to remember one. Maybe that 'unless' needs to be phrased more clearly?
If you go on vacation, is there a backup? And if you retire, or God forbid, get incapacitated from some unforeseen event, is there a continuity plan? I assume contingencies exist
Contingencies exist! There are other mods who know how everything works, and have been at it a long time. I trust them and they'll do a great job if I get hit by a bus. It would just be hard on them to weather the public side of the job.
One thing that would suck if I get hit by a bus is that the people who know the code and the people who know how moderation works aren't the same pepole. That's not optimal.