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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

No, that's formal. Formal systems that purport to answer all questions in advance are a bureaucratic bane, and as long as I'm in charge of HN, we won't go there. I'm confident that the community feels the same way.

If there's any information that someone wants to find out about HN or HN moderation, all they need to do is ask us.

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Dude, you're leaving people guessing. That's no good. That is not nice "informality".

I don't like tone policing in general, but be nice to dang. He has earned that courtesy, at least.

I don't think it's a good idea to complain publicly about the moderation regime here. To me it seems dang and whoever else has thought things through and made reasonable decisions based on, among other considerations, the amount of labour they have at their disposal. Changing that would likely require a very strong incentive, and chatter does not amount to one.

What, I shouldn't publicly comment on the regime?

Why? Will dang send his goons after me?

Everyone is always guessing about everything. I try not to combat too many universals.

No, you're just evading responsibility which, unfortunately, is typical of the tech sector these days.

Maybe you can talk a little bit about how your ideal HN would work, or look like or be moderated like? What sort of stories and comments would it have? How would it be different from the current one? It's hard to tell what you're actually arguing for given that most of your output seems to be directed at some windmill of your own construction.

As I've said, if the capabilities of a user's account are deliberately reduced then report that to the user on their account page. That's being upfront as opposed to being secretive and squirrelly and dodging responsibility.

Ok but the limitations of this have also been explained many times and it's not like the way it works here is unique to HN, that's how almost all forums work. lobste.rs is an attempt to do things somewhat differently and it doesn't feel like much of an improvement.

There are no limitations to simply being upfront and Hacker News can aspire to be better. It doesn't matter how other forums work.

You have to convince other people that this is 'better' and it matters a lot that statistically nobody else believes it's better. It must have crossed your mind at some point that simply repeating 'my way is better' over and over is, at a minimum, not very persuasive.

I don't have to convince other people. dang says, "as long as I'm in charge of HN, we won't go there".

dang is simply repeating "my way is better".

No, I'm sorry, this is plainly wrong. This isn't a dialogue between you and dang where you're having some difference of subjective opinion. You aren't debating whether pineapple on pizza is good or not. HN has been around for ages and in that particular aspect it works pretty much (or more transparently) the way just about every internet forum works. If dang and others are repeating something it's in response to you. You have to make some sort of case for your position being better - your position (which you've barely articulated to any degree of detail) is not somehow equivalent to the prevalent implementation because it doesn't have a prevalent implementation. The onus is on you to make the case for it. Like, that's how discourse (and the effecting of any kind of change, presumably) actually works.

You don't think transparency is better? Let's try it and see the result.

Will dang try it?

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