Comment by xmonkee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xmonkee | Hacker News Reader

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I'll be honest, this just makes me feel terrible. I like to think of HN as the one online community where the comments are usually on point and there's no "power user" bullshit going on.

Slashdot devolved into irrelevant memes by their moderation point system. Every Subreddit eventually becomes an echo chamber. Only on hacker news can you find very divergent opinions expressed side by side without banning, censoring, downvoting or trolling. I'm not saying that pending comments will destroy that, but I already while writing this comment I'm worried about being liked by the big guys. New people with valid opinions who might not know how to appeal to the site's group-think will have a bad time. People with poor language skills will have a bad time. And of course, jokes will have a bad time, and too much seriousness can just as surely dry up a forum as too much frivolity.

>there's no "power user" bullshit going on Sometimes it's possible to notice that moderation is pretty heavy. For example, during recent "Satoshi identity discovered" debacle after brief period it was conspicuously absent from HN. I.e. I estimated that on any given day I would see one or two posts on the topic on the front page, but it wasn't the case. So my theory is that this topic was heavily moderated.

You may be correct, but I doubt it's due to moderators abusing their power. HN has an automated moderation system that is pretty arbitrary. It applies pretty heavy penalties to articles that have too many comments, or posts with certain keywords (like "nsa" and possibly "bitcoin".) Plus there is a regular spam filter that might be less than perfect, and I don't think the posts it filters are shown '[dead]'.

Hard to say. HN still archives dead submissions, so maybe you can verify.

I personally thought the satoshi identity thing was mainstream bullshit.

My assumption was that people in power have a lot of incentive to find out who he is, and would have done so were it possible.

If you have a fundamental disagreement with someone, you get shadow banned.

The only time it makes sense to comment is when you think you can avoid downvotes and flags.

This is what I feel too. It expect it to streamline the comments and kill the discussions.

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