Hacker News Reader

Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

If you've ever wondered what Hacker News looks like to a moderator, now's your chance.

http://www.ycombinator.com/images/home/HackerNews.png

Not to a moderator; to a YC partner. Moderators' Hacker News looks different, and you're going to have to wait till one of us leaks another screenshot to see it.

I feel like since it was we who slipped up, fair game rules say we owe you guys an explanation of what those bells and whistles do (warning: you may find it disappointingly mundane), so I'll come back and post some more in this thread later. By coincidence, however, I was out all day, so had better catch up with anything important first.

Edit: Ok, I think I've answered all the questions about details. But let me add the most important point here.

The interface that you see in that screenshot is not actually used by anyone [1]. Those links are there for legacy reasons. Their principal role at present is to lure YC partners into accidentally fat-fingering things. (Don't worry; that doesn't happen often, and we see it in the logs and correct it.) They don't exist in the YC-partner version of Kevin's new HN markup, so they won't be around much longer.

1. The only exception I can think of is that Trevor occasionally helps out with moderation.

Are all YC founders' usernames orange?

Wouldn't that have the same effect as a voting ring?

yes, yes

I don't know if it's all YC founders or all YC employees, but at least at one point it was public knowledge (as in, Paul Graham repeatedly posted about it) that everyone in YC had an orange username.

It was at least leaked 1 year ago by Techcrunch[1,2]. The search string is: "If you are a YC founder, your username will show up in orange to other YC"[3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730720

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-new...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=If+you+are+a+YC+founder%2C+your+us...

I don't think you can call that "leaked"—it was an interview with PG!

Also, the orange name thing had been discussed on HN long before then. More than once, IIRC. (Sorry, I don't have citations—too tired to dig them up.)

Thanks for the clarification! I agree, leaked was not a proper way of describing it.

Definitely all founders, and definitely some employees who aren't also founders, but I'm not sure if all employees have it. They may; there aren't that many.

It's actually more so we don't get into unnecessarily acrimonious arguments with one another.

Sounds like a feature the whole site could use. ;)

Although I'm guessing that was facetious, it's actually a variant of the truth: it's there to foster the YC network. PG added it years ago when he realized that the number of YC founders had gotten too large for them to know who each other were.

> Wouldn't that have the same effect as a voting ring?

Perhaps, but those votes are caught by the ring detector the same as others, and the same penalties are applied.

It may interest you to know that when PG added the orange name thing, he also added a page showing stories submitted by YC founders. That really did have the same effect as a voting ring—which wasn't the intent, so he got rid of it. (This has also been discussed on HN in the past, btw.)

Kill | blast | nuke

One wonders what the difference in behaviors these have is?

Probably kill = hide from front page, blast = hide from all, and nuke = delete from database (maybe soft-delete). Pure speculation though.

Kill makes it dead, blast makes it trend down the front page fast, nuke is delete/hide. So I believe.

What does "dead" mean?

"dead" on HN is like locking and hiding a thread -- no more voting or commenting and the thread disappears.

dead posts are hidden by default. I believe once you have enough kamra there is a "showdead" option you can enable in your preferences. Dead posts/comments will be marked as [dead], but you can at least still see them.

If nuke is "delete/hide," then what is "delete?"

"Delete" is like "dead", except that the posts aren't visible even if you have showdead turned on. We don't ever delete things unless users ask us to—typically because the window for deleting their own post has expired—and then only when they have a good reason for asking. Otherwise HN's bias is toward preserving history.

Coincidentally, I posted something else about "delete" a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7975137.

> One wonders what the difference in behaviors these have is?

"Kill" makes an item be "[dead]", i.e. hidden from users who don't have the "showdead" setting turned on in their profile. A typical case is killing duplicate posts when they don't have an ongoing discussion. "Blast" is like "kill", but also bans the user. A typical case is banning trolls. "Nuke" is like "blast", but also bans the site. That is for spammers.

Oddly enough, no one asked about the most important by far of all these links, perhaps because it also has the blandest name: "edit". That goes to a page where we can edit an item's title or url, or put some moderation flag on a story.

The Ego of the Mod who uses this. Someone's feeling powerful there.

My 1234th day……

You may not believe it, but the feeling evoked by using those tools is not "mad with power" so much as "is this really what I want to be doing with my life". It's not dictatorial, it's janitorial. Other aspects of the job are better.

I'm not just speaking for myself here, but for everyone who's done it.

kill: - 10; blast: + 10; nuke: - 100;

/conjecture

funny how H N users were up in arms about the recent Facebook mood experiment yet they are in one of the most controlled environments on the internet ...

What are you referring to?

how HN regularly buries posts that critique the startup scene

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but moderators don't do anything of that sort.

Such a bias may be the result of the community's opinions and consequent voting.

I wonder what the percentage means. upvote/flag ratio?

Comments/Points

Item 10 has 439 points and 140 comments. 140/439 = 32%, but it shows 40%.

I'm guessing it's the ratio of older user upvotes vs total upvotes.

huh.

I built a clone at news.intelmap.com a year or two ago, and I don't have the percentages in my admin console. Perhaps an addition since pg's exit?

I believe there's a bunch of unreleased code to do with voting rings and other abuse protection.

> I wonder what the percentage means. upvote/flag ratio?

Good guess, but no. It's a score generated by the ring detector. It's rather out of date, because the code has changed a lot since that computation was written.

I wonder what "hours(51)" means?

The HN accounts of YC founders show an "hours" link at the top of the page that allows them to book office hours with a YC partner.

Thanks. Mirror: http://imgur.com/ge3ZBgt

(EDIT) - Whoops! was looking at the old site still!

Nice improvement! Much better than the old site! ;-)

What does the % at the end signify?

EDIT: % after 'delete' on every submission

You killed the magic

no downvote superpowers ?

>blast makes it trend down the front page

Whoa, that's misleading. You're quoting part of this thread where people were having fun speculating about what the terms might mean. All these guesses were wrong. Please see my explanation elsewhere in the thread.

Nice thumbnail image O_o

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