YC has a vested interest in keeping the HN moderation a certain way, it bring a certain quality to the discourse but it's different than the structure of any sub.
Dang has a direct relationship with the owners of the site and responsibility to them, that relationship doesn't exist in any way on reddit. The mods run amok.
Suggesting HN is effectively just another subreddit dismisses several important differences.
No, I don't think that's how HN works at all. Dan can in fact run amok on HN. I don't believe there are significant pressures from YC on how Dan structures moderation here.
People unfamiliar with the setup here tend to think about YC first when they think about its management, but they should think about Dan first. My understanding is that things are pretty hands-off; even the perks that YC companies get here are, I believe, pretty much things Dan decided to give them.
>Dan can in fact run amok on HN. I don't believe there are significant pressures from YC on how Dan structures moderation here.
I'm sorry but this is absurd. If dang had a mental break and decided only cat picture posts were allowed going forward, there would definitely be a conversation. It being hands-off so far means that YC and dang have current consensus and trust exists.
The trust between YC and Dan regarding HN is probably the whole story about moderation here. Again: people think YC exerts a bunch of influence in how HN is moderated, and I doubt it exerts much influence at all. Dan is running this place the way he'd run it if YC didn't exist.
I'm not sure why you're belaboring the point because whether it's trust or a contractual agreement to run the site a certain way the result is the same. Either way works for my argument which was that the relationship is the difference from reddit's way. I don't care how the relationship is mediated.
About the most interesting thing you can say about YC's "vested interest" is that they have a vested interest in having HN continue to be moderated at Dan's total discretion. That interest would change, obviously, if Dan was raptured. But discussing the possibility of Dan's rapturing is not interesting, curious, or productive: we're not talking about the failure modes of moderation when moderators are incapacitated, we're talking about moderatorial discretion.
>we're not talking about the failure modes of moderation when moderators are incapacitated, we're talking about moderatorial discretion.
I saw the conversation as one about the structure of moderation. Paying a mod that you meet with every week to sync up with is very different from someone making some small sub themselves and enaccting any rules that don't break the sitewide rules. Likewise, a mod has no vested interest in the site nor its policies.
That mod-admin relationship is special on reddit, in a mostly bad way since admins ignore many mod issues. Dang is more like a moderator and an admin rolled into one.
He was banned for trolling after being repeatedly warned to stop. I have no idea why you thought that was "pressure from above". But there are people who think any ban on HN is an insidious plot by YC, so it's not worth arguing.
His whole comment history and the warnings he received are right there for everybody to read. But, no, I'm sure you're right: it's all an elaborate plot, because BayesianWitch threatened to upend the YC hegemony.
Being courteous, thoughtful, and taking best-faith interpretations are key aspects of the ideology that is mandatory under this site’s guidelines. This is a wildly unpopular ideology at other sites.
If a user or mod noticed them breaking those guidelines over time, and they continued doing so after being repeatedly warned, then they absolutely would have been banned for their ideology.
Otherwise, I don’t think anyone really cares how disagreeable their viewpoint is, so long as they’re courteous and contributing while expressing it (and it’s not derogatory, hate speech, etc).
>This is a wildly unpopular ideology at other sites.
it's why I still end up browsing here even if I decide to delete multiple reddit accounts. People on reddit seem to have fallen into Poe's law of that Big Lewboski quote:
>"you're not wrong, Walter you're just an asshole!"
>"Okay then"
Another forum gives some leeway for discarding courteousness if the post is truly dangerous to heed and absolutely needs to be smacked down as an example of what not to do. But reddit presses that button for every situation. pet being outside, car doing something that may be legal in their state but illegal in the commenter's state, one-sided relationship drama, video games. It's all just flooded with insults and in-fighting over inane stuff.
I'd never heard of him, so I looked up his history. His banning causes me to reconsider participation in this forum at all. And it's sad to see the quality of those 2017 threads compared to today. So thoughtful, so many citations.
The fact of being an HN employee means that Dan has a sword of Damocles above his head the whole time. Whether or not YC are actually calling him up day-to-day and telling him to do X or Y is irrelevant; he's smart enough to figure out what X and Y are and do them pre-emptively, and he knows his livelihood depends on it.
Exactly, I'm so confused why people are speculating that dang is the only employee in the world not subject to a performance review. If someone is paying you, they have a stake in your work.
I imagine that (thoughtfully) moderating a site as large as HN is no easy task, and though I'm all for more transparency, I think logs like that have the potential to open a whole can of worms and add much more burden on Dan. All of a sudden you get a bunch of HN posts that solely exist to criticize Dan's decisions which clog up the feed. If a rule is added against this it looks like even more censorship.
Lobsters [1] has mod logs, but it also has a much smaller community, and it's invite-only so there's less need for moderation in the first place.
I don't think logs are needed in community moderated by single person, don't need logs to know who did what.
But for something like Reddit when there is more mods the anonymity basically means impunity to any judgement; nobody but mods themselves can say whether a certain bias in actions can be attributed to few mods or to everyone in the mod team.
And frankly if you can't handle a critique of your actions you shouldn't be moderating actions of others in the first place
Dang is employed by HN.
>That's not why reddit is different. It's because a lot of the humans that run the subreddits are inconsistent.
You're disagreeing and then saying something that isn't appreciably different.