zlacker

Really appreciate that you take the time to weigh in with these explanations. The moderation can feel heavy handed and arbitrary at times so these comments help to shine a light on the difficult balance you're trying to maintain. The explanation about SNI especially helped me understand some of the tough judgement calls that the mods need to make.

Is there a manifesto of some sort that defines the philosophy and approach of HN moderation? Or is just tribal knowledge that mods have built over time?

>>GavCo+(OP)
It's kind of in between. There's no manifesto other than the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which leave out a ton of information—we keep them brief in the hope that people will actually read them. But there's a trove of knowledge about all of this embedded in past moderation comments, which is why I constantly post HN Search links. I realize it's not a convenient format at all, but you can learn a lot if you start with those links and then tweak the searches either by adding terms or excluding them (as in "-foo"). If you (or anyone) do that and still have questions which I haven't answered in the past, I'd be interested in hearing the questions.

It's my intention to distill a bunch of those explanations into a set of loose commentaries on how HN and HN moderation work. But it's the sort of thing that never rises above the middle of the todo list. Maybe one day.