zlacker

I think that if the moderation becomes public, it becomes a target and not an effective way to measure behavior. People will try to game the ways they interact with moderators. They'll start to argue and lawyer you against yourself -- "you didn't demote this post but you demoted mine". I think any of us who have done user moderation for more than a month has seen this kind of behavior.

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.

>>labste+(OP)
Wow, those are great points and I hope it's ok if I plunder them for future discussions.

I completely agree about wanting to stay on the human side of formal vs. human.

>>dang+vO
Feel free to reuse anything here. I feel like that was only bits and pieces of what I'm really thinking, but human behavior is so vast in scope that it defies easy analysis.

>>labste+Yi1
If you ever write more of what you're thinking on this topic, please let me know at hn@ycombinator.com. I'd like to read it. Users often point things out that we haven't thought of, but this was a particularly memorable case to me.