I've known employers like this. I've worked for employers like this. Employers are already monitoring social media. Third party services are paid by employers to monitor for staff that might be looking at other jobs. Recruiters make it their mission to know who's looking and what employers are likely to need their services in the near future. This is much of why trust and discretion is the most important asset on both sides of hiring related activities.
Triplebyte burning down their reputation as a recruitment avenue is one thing. Locking job searchers into reputation and livelihood risks inside Triplebyte's own reputation dumpster fire, on the friday before a holiday weekend, during historic unemployment levels, in the middle of a fucking pandemic, is unforgivable. The CEO showing up in person with hamfisted gaslighting (seriously?) in the middle of this self made disaster makes me hope those comments don't get flagged out of future HN search results.
Triplebyte is a YC company and HN is a YC site, so economic interests are aligned with nuking highly critical comments
What 'nabilhat is talking about is the way the Triplebyte CEO’s comments in this thread (which are the opposite of “highly critical”) are being downvoted to very light grey.
This is theoretically true, but the fact that it's been on the home page for 12 hours and has accumulated hundreds of critical comments, none of which any mod has touched, seems to (a) eliminate that possibility and (b) demonstrate that the risk is theoretical, not actual.
(Keep in mind that YC has thousands of investments, so whatever you think of their ethics or the incentives, a filter like this would be impractical and obvious. Also see "Not behaving in a way that damages the reputation of his/her company" on https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/ - it's hard to imagine YC supporting this.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280120
Piggybacking on this comment and linking here so people can more easily see how completely tone-deaf it was.
More from his comment history here:
To my surprise, it was back up near the top this morning with almost a thousand votes and hundreds of comments. TripleByte may have chosen to burn their reputation irreparably, but I have gained a lot of faith in YC and the mods here.
https://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free...
HaD wasn't hidden.. Thalmic was.
Dang has usually responded with noncommital responses like they never do that. But further requests for being transparent has fallen on deaf ears.
edit: and -1'ed. Is this because "my content sucks"? Is it because of 'offtopic'? Or is it a mod?
Considering karma here determines rights, rate limiting, mod-down, flagging, and more - these points do matter here. And of course the larger issue here is lack of transparency. In fact, with removal of mod scores, the site has gone down in transparency.
> making a profile public meant making public that people were job searching
was repeatedly met with this response:
> we're not making any profile details public.
Which avoided what people were upset about. It's talking past the issue and I'm not sure what the expected outcome was, either from this original screw-up or the response.
YC's economic interest in HN is having it be a happy, thriving community. That dominates all other considerations put together. A fast way to ruin that would be to destroy the community's good faith by suppressing negative posts about YC or YC startups. In addition to being wrong (we wouldn't want to belong to such a community ourselves), it would be dumb. If anyone wants more explanation there are posts about HN vis-à-vis YC's business interests going back years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., which describes the simple way we try to optimize this (simple in principle, though not in execution). And see https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements/ from 2015 about HN's editorial independence.
(Edit—because I've been wanting to write about this for some time and this may as well be the place:)
The above is the answer I always give to questions of how HN serves YC's business, because it's true and it's solid economics. It's the right answer to give to anyone who's looking at the question through a cynical economic lens (as we all have been trained to do) since it basically says "we can be even more cynically self-interested by not doing that".
However, I also always feel a little bad after giving that answer because it's not the deeper truth. The deeper truth is that we just feel this way. HN and YC grew up together. In a way they are siblings, and one doesn't exploit one's sibling. Or, to switch metaphors: because HN and YC grew together, the connections between them are complex and organic, like the connections between brain hemispheres. If you get in there and start snipping and moving things around, you'll probably lobotomize yourself.
If you want a hard-nosed business reason for how HN makes money for YC, one is: it leads to people starting startups that wouldn't otherwise exist, and it leads to YC funding startups that it wouldn't otherwise get to fund. That's how HN adds to YC's core business (edit: but see [1] below). I use that reasoning to explain to people why we don't need to sell ads on HN or do other things to monetize it or drive growth. Again, though, it doesn't capture how I (and I think most at YC) really think and feel about HN. The deeper truth is the two have always been together and we can't imagine them otherwise.
In other words, the value of HN to YC is intangible. That affects how we operate HN. If the value were tangible, then snipping things and moving them around and generally being bustling and managerial would be the way to go, or at least the most likely thing that people inside a business would do. But since it's intangible, all that kind of thing gets supplanted by a general feeling of "this is good, don't fuck it up". Since the main indicator of whether we're fucking it up or not is the community, the way HN can most add value to YC is by keeping the community happy. Happiness means interest (HN is supposed to be interesting) and trust (a community can't exist without trust).
This is not a paradise that will last forever—it's a historical accident that an internet forum ended up in a sweet spot vis-à-vis the company that owns it, where the business is better off optimizing for the forum being good and happy than by banner ads or growth hacking. But we all know that it's an honor to get to be stewards of a community in that way, and while nothing lasts forever, we want to keep it going as long as possible, and maybe longer than one could reasonably have thought possible.
[1] edit: for some reason I forgot to mention the three formal things that HN also gives to YC: job ads for YC startups, Launch HNs for YC startups, and displaying YC founder usernames in orange to other YC founders. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23293437 for more.
That raises the obvious question of why we have such software if it causes such problems, but the answer is simply that it helps more than it hurts, overall.
I looked at that hackaday.com page. It says this: "Quick aside, but if you want to see how nearly every form of media is crooked, try submitting this to Hacker News and look at the Thalmic investors. Edit: don’t bother, we’re blacklisted or something."...but is also linkless. Usually when people make dudgeonly claims but conspicuously omit links, it's because what actually happened doesn't match what they say.
Re "dang has usually responded with noncommital responses": I try to be commital. There is little to be gained by not, since we try not to do things that aren't defensible to the community in the first place. If you have any tips to offer for increased commitalness, I'd like to hear them.
Edit: I just noticed this bit: "further requests for being transparent has fallen on deaf ears". When? That doesn't sound like us.
I think it's a really, really great response. YC community is indeed very special, and I am often surprised that over these years, it keep attracting high caliber people and has a high signal/noise ratio, while at the same time remains a pleasant community that favors civilized discussion.
Moderating is a thankless job, but please rest assured that many people here value your efforts, even if we don't verbalize this gratitude often.
Meta threads and discussions tend to invite objections from the litigious type of user. Such users are rarely satisfied, but have a ton of energy for meta argument, so it's easy to get into a situation where any answer you give leads to two or three fresh objections. Such objections have to be answered with great care, because if you slip up and say the wrong thing, people will use it to drum up a scandal (edit: and will quote it against you for years to come!). This consumes a lot of mental and emotional energy. (Edit: btw, this is asymmetrical: the people raising objections and making accusations are under no such restriction. They can say anything without downside, no matter how false it is or what they accuse you of. They can make things up with impunity and people will believe them by default, because on the internet you are guilty until proven innocent, plus everyone loves the underdog. These are additional reasons why it's easy to end up in a situation where every comment you spend an hour painstakingly composing earns you a bunch more counterarguments and demands.) These arguments tend to be repetitive, so you find yourself having to say the same things and defend against the same attacks and false accusations over and over. This is discouraging, and there's a high risk of burnout. Disgruntled users are a tiny minority, but there are more than enough of them to overwhelm our limited resources—it ends up being something like a DoS attack.
I fear this outcome, so we've always shied away from adding such a system. We want to be transparent, and we answer whatever questions people ask, but it feels safer to do it ad hoc as questions come up. There's no specific question you can't get an answer to, other than a few special cases like how HN's anti-abuse software works.
There's an opportunity cost issue too. The vast majority of the community is pretty happy with how we do things—I know that because if they weren't, we'd never hear the end of it, and then we'd say sorry and readjust until they were. I think it makes more sense to do things to keep the bulk of the community happy, or make them happier, than to pour potentially all our resources into placating a small minority—especially since, once you've done this job for a while (say, a week) you know that nothing you do will ever be completely right or please everyone.
On the other hand, if I could ever be persuaded that a full moderation log would satisfy everyone's curiosity and reduce the overhead of misinterpretation, complaints, imagined malfeasance, etc., then we'd be happy to do it.
This question has come up repeatedly, so if you're curious to read previous answers, see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
I agree with you that any community faces the problem of a vocal, critical, and nearly insurgent minority. They seek to identify contradictions in your logic with the predominantly self-interested goal of demonstrating intellectual superiority rather than finding genuine solutions. I can understand the emotional burden of continually sparring with such individuals. You can't please everyone.
In contrast, there is the silent majority. By virtue of their silence, it would appear they condone current management of the site. I am not sure this can be assumed.
First, it is generally the "first movers" of a given activity who are both the first to try it, but also the first to defect. For example, there are people who are passionate about Microsoft or Apple products and review them publicly. When they stop reviewing these products, it is indicative of a lack of passion; they have moved on. The majority soon follows, just like they did when the first movers initially promoted the activity. In this way, the first mover is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Are HN's vocal critics really first movers? The ones who are thoughtful, at least, are certainly among the most passionate and engaged; losing them would be the canary. (Admittedly, you must be able to discern those who are vocal and thoughtful from those who are vocal and thoughtless, but I am confident you have that capacity.)
Second, there is the issue of the 90-9-1 rule. The vast majority of users of HN never comment nor express their opinion; they simply observe. This will be true whether or not they are satisfied with the service. If they are dissatisfied, they don't comment, they simply leave. On the other hand, composing only 10%, the vocal minority must necessarily be the minority. Can we uniformly dismiss this vocal minority as unrepresentative of the silent majority? No, because there is no other proxy for surveying the majority. (Again, you must discern the productive from the unproductive critics.)
Finally, there is the burden of simply engaging. I am amazed by the amount of time and effort you must invest into moderating HN and in writing your responses (among, I'm sure, numerous other activities such as actually writing code). It appears that recapitulating your justifications over and over again is not particularly efficient.
That, however, does not imply that failing to justify your actions is suddenly an adequate substitute. It simply means that the current method is inefficient.
There are a few conclusions I think we can draw from this. We can't dismiss the vocal minority because it's all we have; rather, we must discern those who are constructive from those who are destructive. Further, like blowing onto a flame to put it out, ignoring or suppressing them will likely instigate even more frenzied conspiracizing. Finally, responding to each of them individually is inefficient and burdensome.
I think a basic ledger of "moderator actions" would solve many of these issues. To start, it would probably not be an exhaustive log, but simply actions performed at the thread-level rather than the comment-level. It is transparent, just like your comments and the HN community guidelines already are. It would broaden understanding of your actions, rather than rely on users to dig through your recent comments (the only ledger thus far, without which they undoubtedly draw their own conclusions). Finally, it would reduce the burden on you.
Would it, however, pacify the vocal minority? Would they conspiracize further? Would they levy more demands to change the site?
Perhaps, perhaps not.
But it seems clear that those who are worth listening to, vocal as they may be, are in fact worth listening to. They are the canaries. And if they increasingly demand more transparency (which you would know, not I), that is likely worth making some steps toward satisfying. If they make more demands, so be it.
Communities change over time, especially as a function of scale, and I think HN is no different. The only thing that generally must be kept constant is prudent stewardship, and I am fairly confident your track record satisfies that. There may be mistakes along the way, but as long as you make a transparent, genuine effort to serve the community (as you clearly have done historically), that will go along way in retaining the trust of the community.
Maybe such a device would satisfy everyone's curiosity and make the community as happy as a gently tickled baby. Users would raise questions, other users would helpfully look up what happened in the moderation log, and still other helpful users would chime in with past examples of how we do things that way, and why. Enormous pressure would lift from our shoulders and we could sit back and eat potato chips (or carrot sticks), or even better, work on the code. No longer would we be under attack from all sides. The war would be over and transparency would rule the land. Huzzah! (In case that sounds sarcastic, I do have that fantasy sometimes.)
On the other hand, maybe it would be the apocalypse. I fear the apocalypse. There isn't a lot of room for more pressure of the kind I described upthread. We operate on the edge of being maxed out.
Also...I have a feeling that it might not be good in the long run. Moderators here are in a super complex dance with the community. I think it's important for them (us) to have the degrees of freedom that non-public moderation provides. It allows you to do things, try things, take chances, make mistakes, etc., that you wouldn't do if you were under floodlights all the time. It's for the same reason that you wouldn't want your boss standing behind you, breathing down your neck all day—even though you're not doing anything the boss would object to, except perhaps checking Hacker News too much—except that it's actually in the boss's interest for you to be checking HN that much, because it's complicated, besides which sometimes something comes up on HN that actually makes a big difference, plus...never mind, the boss wouldn't understand. It's just best if the boss lets you do your job.
I like this analogy, because the community really is the boss here...if by boss you mean a ten-headed dragon who likes to bite your head off once a day or so, but you know how to reattach your head so it's ok, except it still feels bad to have your head bitten off, plus it takes hours to reattach it. It could be that allowing moderators that degree of opacity turns out to be an essential aspect of operating the site.
But the truth is I don't know. sama suggested we do this 6 years ago and I said no way, for the same reason. Maybe in another 6 years I'll have worked through the fear.
One last thing. If anyone is reading this and thinking of replying "Aha, moderator guy, I've got you! If you're so afraid...what are you hiding from the community? tell us that, you self-contradictor, you!"...I've already planted an effective rebuttal to that precise objection in this thread. So tread carefully, objector guy! Or maybe I haven't, and I'm just saying that, because it's complicated.
I would agree that you shouldn't, but all too often we see companies do.
Transparency is great in public institutions that spend our tax money. In communities like this, we just need a chieftain to handle our disputes fairly and keep us all from going nuts every so often. Those of us who have been coming back for years already know that you do that, or at least try your best to be fair and open and neutral.
I doubt you could keep everyone happy by releasing a log of moderator actions. People complain now, but look at ArbCom on Wikipedia, which makes all the decisions in public, and there are websites devoted to trashing the process there. And if you're not making people happier, nor making their interactions here more pleasant or informative, what is the goal again?
Plus, it's not just moderators getting a chance to make mistakes, it's also the users. I don't want to end up in a log somewhere for my terrible posts. You've told me to improve before, and I did. At least I've tried to. Admittedly my posts haven't been high quality lately. Anyway, the more formalized the process becomes, the less human we're all allowed to be. That can be good or bad, but I think in this case it's been good. Most of the reactions to OP tend to think that privacy is valuable sometimes.
I could be wrong, of course. Do what you think is best for us. That's why we keep coming back.
1) YC company friendly marketing channel. Reasonably good posts from YC companies get upvotes here, which means eyeballs and potential customers or users.
2) YC company recruiting channel. Related to above, since many posts end in “we’re hiring”, but there’s also the explicit time-decaying recruiting posts that show up on the front page.
Are these not concerns? Or just secondary to increasing startup formation generally?
I'm sure that over the years there have been countless opportunities to ruin the community for short term gain, and because the right decisions were made, the community will in most cases never know or appreciate the choice. The only evidence is that HN is still here, and hasn't been trampled down by the armies of mammon even when so many other internet communities have been.
Sometimes you have to protect a goose, even at cost, just because it's a happy goose and it's alive.
It's rare in a place where so many think they are being hard-nosed little economists (though actually merely joining the chorus of short-sighted armchair bean-counters) to admit that you did something without needing any economic justification.
I completely agree about wanting to stay on the human side of formal vs. human.
More interestingly: do you have examples in mind?
Definitely #2. The job ads that appear on the front page are only for YC startups, and that's one of three formal ways that HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it. The other two are that YC startups get to do Launch HNs, which get placed on the front page (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), and YC alumni usernames are displayed in orange to other YC alumni. For some reason I always forget to mention these things when writing on the above topic, I guess because I don't think they add up to the biggest thing, even though they're significant. In my mind the big thing is the connection to startups forming and applying to YC. However, no one has ever tried to measure these things, and I'd feel a bit queasy about doing so. It would feel like stepping out of the magic circle in a fairy tale. One should not step out of the magic circle.