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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

That's inevitable, because consistency is impossible: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... How to interpret the inconsistency is a different question, of course. I'm curious what you see that seems most discrepant to you?

The closest I can give to an account of "how things work in reality" is the 80,000+ moderation comments I've posted over the last 10+ years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang&type=comment&dateRange.... You're free to decide it's all lies, of course, but if you (or anyone) randomly scroll back through that feed, I doubt you'll find much that's miles apart from the rules as they are written. In fact I'd be surprised if you found anything that could be fairly be described that way, because trying to apply the rules as they are written is a matter of integrity for us. If it weren't, we'd change the rules until it were.

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I had to rely inline above because of some questionable circumstances but not here to debate that part at all.

But on the topic of this active page I do find it rather poetic that in this exact thread we have people asking what is this page they’ve never heard of.

When I call it secret, I don’t mean it’s necessarily a coverup or something I mean that nobody seems to know that it exists or that the front page doesn’t actually represent what people vote for.

You might want to use a more accurate word like 'obscure' in that case.

At this point I'm not sure what you're accusing us of, other than HN not being a different kind of site. The mandate of this place is clear (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and it simply isn't primarily to feature political/sensational/outrage stories. That's the root issue. The mechanics of voting, flagging, etc., are in service of that.

From my perspective, you're arguing for a health food store to devote its shelf space to chocolates and pastries. Or, if you prefer the other way round, for a confectionery to devote itself to turnips.

I don’t think that actually engages with literally any of the points I’ve made but sure, I wasn’t expecting anything else. Like I said earlier it seems from where you’re sitting everything is going great and there’s nothing to answer for.

I was hoping however you could at least shine some light on the active page question… what percentage of users actually visit in on any given day? We can play semantic games about secret vs obscure but it’s not a debate about semantics.

If you knew how bad HN regularly makes me feel, you would be attributing very different sentiments than those. The point isn't that HN is perfect or even very good. It's that your objections are ignoring what the site is for. Improving the site means making it better fulfill its mandate, but you're not arguing from that place at all, and in fact are (implicitly) arguing that we rip out that mandate and replace it with a different one.

I haven't looked up the number of users who visit the /active page because I don't accept the premise of your question. Of course fewer users look at it than the frontpage; otherwise it would be the frontpage. This is just another variation of the mandate argument.

I’m not here to try and make you feel bad but if this place doesn’t work for you anymore I hope you’re able to do something about that.

I’m going to wrap this up here. You unfortunately responded in exactly the way I’d expected to just hand wave away everything, find reasons to not respond to any of the points and then seemed to misrepresent what I was even asking for.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.

Life is hard enough already and I’m not looking to make it worse for you. I hope you have a nice holiday season and good luck out there.

You're not making me feel bad! I just mentioned that HN regularly makes me feel bad as a way of letting you know that I definitely don't think this place is perfect.

I'm not disinterested in answering your questions—that's why I've been replying repeatedly! Nor am I interested in making hand-wavey responses; that would be a waste of time. We must be working with different assumptions, though, because I feel like I'm answering your questions and you feel like I'm not.

If you want to try again, I'd be happy to, but maybe we could take a different approach? I would like to know what principle you care about here. What principle are we failing to abide by, that you think we ought to?

I appreciate the offer, I actually have somewhere else to be in a moment unfortunately so I’d have to take you up on that offer another time.

Another time, then - and sorry that this time was so frustrating.

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