Comment by potsandpans | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potsandpans | Hacker News Reader

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It's always curious how and when you decide to pop into threads and request that people follow the rules of hackernews. You claim that the site and your moderation principles are not (or have limited) ideologically motivated(tions), but your enforcement (or engagement) is uneven and certainly along some political axis.

From the rules:

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Yet one of the top comments of most front page items is always a useless comment of clickbait or some pedantic complaint/accusation about some format of the title/submission.

You have a hard job, it's not intended to be an indictment of your behavior. Just a general observation that I wonder if you're cognizant of.

If the community needs this so badly, why is the above aforementioned behavior so prevent that it's become a meme of hackernews behavior?

They key word in your comment is "certainly".

People are constantly (over)interpreting this "mods are against my side" bias into what we do (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but I can tell you for sure without knowing which side you're on (or what the topic even is) that people you disagree with feel just as strongly that we're clearly/obviously/certainly against them and that we tilt the field towards you. It is by far the most consistent phenomenon I've observed in years of doing this job.

Why? Because everyone, including the people on your side and the people on the opposing side, reads meaning into random subsequences (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion), place strong emphasis on the datapoints they most dislike, and often don't even notice the counterexamples (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

You're right, of course, that moderation is uneven, but the chief reason for that is that we don't come close to seeing everything. Beyond that, we no doubt have our biases (though different mods have different ones), but we also work hard at suspending them when moderating and have many years of practice at doing so. Many of our "you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly lately" replies are addressed to commenters whose position on an underlying topic we actually agree with.

I would never claim that we are perfect at being even-handed—this is impossible—but it's nothing as crude as what you think you're seeing here. That explains why the people you're most implacably opposed to also believe they're seeing the same thing, just in the opposite direction.

It's even more curious that merely pointing out that you unevenly moderate triggers yet another link to the clustering illusion.

The truth is: we never will be able to know the biases of this community or mod team with accuracy, because hackernews doesn't expose enough data to be able to perform a meaningful analysis.

The call-out is disjoint from the rest of what you go on to say. I said you are _certainly_ biased. I didn't say how. Your comment starts with saying that people are predisposed to feel persecuted due to biases, which is somehow related to my use of the word, and then you go on to essentially confirm exactly the intention of my callout.

> That explains why the people you're most implacably opposed to also believe they're seeing the same thing, just in the opposite direction.

Cordially, I have no idea what you're talking about or referring to in this regard. Who is my enemy that you've invented here? I'm not representing a position on behalf of the community, other than to point out that this moderation has _some_ uneven biases, and it's always interesting when they show.

In the words of @tomhow

> The choice is yours to make an effort to observe the guidelines and be a positive contributor to HN, or alternatively to keep using HN for political/ideological battle

What's my political and ideological battle? Functional programming? Ai usage?

When political topics come up, I engage with the discourse. That's within the bounds of the spirit of this community.

I assumed you were the GP commenter and that created some confusion - sorry about that.

But now I'm confused why you consider it curious that we pop into threads and request that people follow the rules. That's obviously the job.

An observation of when the job is selectively exercised. It's clearly not evenly applied across all of the rules. There are some obvious applications, and there are some non-obvious applications.

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