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Thanks for the detailed response! And sorry for breaking policy regarding contacting you about this. I strongly agree with disallowing hard-paywall articles, si

by ijpsud 6y ago

Thanks for the detailed response! And sorry for breaking policy regarding contacting you about this. I strongly agree with disallowing hard-paywall articles, since many HN members are from lower-economic areas that simply can't afford US-priced subscriptions. Regarding the "silent" down-weighting, unless I've misunderstood, I think that's a very bad idea. I think all moderation activity should be transparent to the users of the community. > we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or its startups are involved I think it's great that you have this as an explicit policy! Thanks for all your work moderating this community. Aside: I found the Airbnb post interesting because I recently saw a map showing a massive rise in the number of apartments for rent as home owners move off Airbnb. I'm in the market for a new rental, and I totally didn't see this surge in supply and consequent price-drop coming. So this topic is interesting to me. But, more generally, the particularly "harsh" externalities of the pandemic on specific tech markets/startups is interesting to me, and I saw this Airbnb post as another data point to add to my mental models of how pandemics like this affect various markets. I think the fact that it got 15 points in 30 minutes is evidence that some non-trivial subset of other HN users felt this way too. In any case, transparent moderation would probably help the community to inform you of accidental bad moderation choices (not to say you should always go with the crowd's decisions, of course).

dang 6y ago
> I think all moderation activity should be transparent to the users of the community It's a reasonable thing to think, and a lot of people do, but the worry is that it would lead to reams more meta-discussion and litigation, which would amount to a DoS attack on the limited resources we have. That is, resources which ought to go into making the site better for everyone would get squandered answering objections from the litigious sort of users who make two new objections for every answer you give them. That would be a catastrophic outcome, not only because of the DoS aspect, not only because those users are a tiny minority, but because of what it would do to moderator morale, which is precarious to begin with and could easily tip into burnout. That doesn't mean we don't care about transparency—we do! We always answer users' questions. We just do it on an ad hoc basis rather than with a bureaucratic system. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22dos%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

by ijpsud 6y ago

dang 6y ago

> I think all moderation activity should be transparent to the users of the community It's a reasonable thing to think, and a lot of people do, but the worry is that it would lead to reams more meta-discussion and litigation, which would amount to a DoS attack on the limited resources we have. That is, resources which ought to go into making the site better for everyone would get squandered answering objections from the litigious sort of users who make two new objections for every answer you give them. That would be a catastrophic outcome, not only because of the DoS aspect, not only because those users are a tiny minority, but because of what it would do to moderator morale, which is precarious to begin with and could easily tip into burnout. That doesn't mean we don't care about transparency—we do! We always answer users' questions. We just do it on an ad hoc basis rather than with a bureaucratic system. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22dos%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...