zlacker

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that you can't take the human being out of the moderator, nor would it be good to try. No in the sense that I'm not moderating HN just according to my personal interests—it would be very different if I did. As a matter of fact, I spend every day denying my own preferences about HN. That doesn't make me objective (far from it), but I do at least have a lot of practice.

It's a matter of striking a balance: holding space for what the community finds interesting* while allowing for a certain amount of idiosyncracy and unpredictability, but not too much. Without that, things would be more humdrum and therefore less interesting. There are tradeoffs along every conceivable axis with this thing.

* (note: community is not the same as commenters because most readers don't comment)

>>dang+(OP)
> community is not the same as commenters because most readers don't comment

Do you have stats on what percent of regular HN readers have ever commented on any story? Or are stats more like, for every 100 readers of a story, 1 will comment on that story? To put another way: if I read 100 stories and comment on 1, would I be counted as lurking 99 times and posting 1?

Basically, I'm curious if engagement is lopsided toward lurking because some users never comment, or because most users never comment on every story they read.

>>TechBr+Jg
Yes, I looked it up a couple times over the years and it was astonishing close to whoever's law that says 1% of users produce 90% of UGC.

I think it was something like 1% of total readers and 5% of logged-in readers but I'd have to check again to be sure.