Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

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People will tailor their comments to please the endorsers that be. We will be turning inward mentally, and we will never know how much.

This might be the goal.

YC has been fairly heavily criticized for comments on certain topics which don't toe the party line. Mitigating such comments may be beneficial for YC (the business) in order to avoid negative publicity and attacks from powerful adversaries looking to score a symbolic victory [1]. Remember "The [mis]Information" interview with PG?

Discussions of such topics are mostly a distraction from what most of us come here for anyway, so it likely would not hurt HN much, particularly if it is turned on in sensitive threads only. In my view banning such topics would be a better solution, but I'm aware that HN has been attacked by critics for the soft ban (which pushes such stories down quickly), so this might be the best compromise for the business.

(It's important to remember that YC is a business and HN is just advertising for the business.)

[1] YC is a good target for such a symbolic victory since they are weak supporters of the cause and are unlikely to fight back too strongly but are also highly visible.

If our goal were to decrease criticism of YC, this wouldn't work. In fact, it wouldn't work as a way to eliminate any specific type of critical comment, because all it takes to make a comment visible is a small number of the many people who can endorse comments. To ensure a comment would be suppressed, the endorsers would have to be unanimously opposed to it, and it's hard to think of opinions that many HN users are unanimous about. Certainly an uncritical admiration for YC is not one of them.

What you say about YC being a good target for a symbolic victory is very insightful though. That is a real conundrum. I think it explains why any company over a certain size tends to express itself pretty blandly.

I don't believe the goal was to decrease criticism of YC on HN, I believe that part of the goal might be to reduce HN comments which have provided fodder for criticism of YC in other media.

Being specific, assorted feminist critics of YC/technology have complained strongly about HN comments being skeptical, not toeing the party line, etc. In the mainstream media, it's not too hard to blame YC/you/Altman for views that commenters here might express.

Similarly, such critics have also complained about cursing/mysogyny/racism in github repos and implicitly attributed them to Github, Inc. (For example, I don't work for github, but github could be blamed for the fact that "I have no fucking clue why this speeds things up": https://github.com/scalanlp/breeze/blame/master/src/main/sca... )

You suggested in some previous discussion on this that people who use the endorsing power incorrectly (I don't believe this was clarified but I haven't followed this endorsement thing closely [1]) might lose the power to endorse. Combining endorsement with filtering the "bad" endorsers could certainly work to steer the sort of comments that are endorsed. Rather than filtering all comments one need only filter the much smaller group of endorsers.

If you say this is not the goal and the plan is not to do this, I will drastically reduce my estimate of the probability that this is the goal. But at the moment I don't find it implausible.

[1] Most of the time I waste here is waiting for computations to finish and code to compile. But I imagine if I stopped commenting here I might be more productive, so I'm not personally strongly opposed to changes that might push me away from this site.

Oops, I get it now. It should decrease the sort of comment people attack HN for, but that wasn't the purpose of it. Those comments are just a subset of the more general problem of users saying mean and/or stupid things about any topic.

The real motivation for pending comments, incidentally, was simply that I found, as a user, that I didn't like reading comment threads as much as I used to. HN was an instance of me following the advice I often give founders: to build something you yourself want.

maybe you liked them better when scores were displayed? have you thought about displaying them again to see if that changes your perceived quality?

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