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>>lordna+(OP)
Hacker News is a well-moderated community, but it's illustrative to see where Hacker News fails at moderation. While Hacker News is great at protecting the community from disruptive individuals, it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob.

I support Hacker News moderating itself however it chooses. However, if we are looking at it as a moderation model for large, open, non-editorial platforms (Youtube, Facebook) -- which I believe should all be covered under public accommodation law -- it clearly fails. And even if when we are looking at ostensibly neutral, publicly-orientated sites like newspaper comment boards, it fails.

Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights.

So while this moderation method succeeds for Hacker News, and perhaps should become the model for small private sites, we should not try to scale it internet-size companies. Platform companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) and backbone companies (ISPs, Cloudflare!) need a different set of rules geared towards protecting individual rights and freedoms instead of protecting a community.

>>romaae+Ge
You've just voiced the thing I dislike most about the HN. And I do not fully agree with "Gackle and Bell, by contrast, practice a personal, focussed, and slow approach to moderation". The faceless "we" they love so much does not appear very personal to me.

Disclaimer: I have an axe to grind having my account with 9k+ karma and dating back to 2009 banned for whatever. Despite that I am trying my best to look at the situation objectively and I still do not like it.

It is popular to compare reddit with HN and my take would be like this: reddit is like a part of the Universe where stars are still (maybe moving a bit past this though) born, and there is life and dynamics. HN, otoh, seems to be inching closer and closer to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

>>rimliu+qi
Agreed, HN's lack of transparency is slowly killing it. You can see the discussions becoming more one-dimensional every day.

>>radcon+Fx
You're being downvoted because you're hitting on a trope/cliche that's called out in the rules, and while I doubt HN is dying from a user engagement perspective, I do believe the comments are less filled with value than they have been in the past, given how negativity dang sees conflict.

Healthy conflict is good, but I've participated in healthy conflict here and was stopped by dang because of it.