0. >>40435440
It's not that I don't trust the mods explicitly, it's just that showing such numbers (if they exist) would be helpful for transparency.
Pretty asinine response but I work in Hollywood and each studio lot has public tours giving anyone that wants a glimpse behind the curtain. On my shows, we’ve even allowed those people to get off the studio golf cart to peek inside at our active set. Even answering questions they have about what they see which sometimes explains Hollywood trickery.
I’m sure there’s tons of young programmers that would love to see and understand how such a long-lasting great community like this one persists.
The innovation on detecting patterns would be incredible, and in reality I think would be best to evolve into allowing user-decided algorithms that they personally subscribe to.
future gpt prompt : "Take 200000 random comments and threads from hacker news, look at how they rank over time and make assumptions about how the moderation staff may be affecting what you consume. Precisely consider the threads or comments which have risque topics regarding politics or society or projects that are closely related to Hacker News moderation staff or Y Combinator affiliates."
All you can really do on the internet is ride the waves of synchronicity where the community and moderation is at harmony, and jump ship when it isnt! Any other conceit that some algorithm or innovation or particular transparency will be this cure all to <whatever it is we want> feels like it never pans out, the boring truth is that we are all soft squishy people.
Show me a message board that is ultimately more harmonious and diverse and big as this one!
HN drives a boatload of traffic, so getting on the front page has economic value. That means there are 100% people out there who will abuse a published ranking system to spam us.
It should not be surprising that the outcomes are different.
5. Sam Altman
I was told I shouldn't mention founders of YC-funded companies in this list. But Sam Altman can't be stopped by such flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he's going to be.
Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. On questions of design, I ask "What would Steve do?" but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask "What would Sama do?"
What I learned from meeting Sama is that the doctrine of the elect applies to startups. It applies way less than most people think: startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.
Which is interesting, because it's sacrilege to insinuate that it's being gamed at all.
The short version is that users flagged that one plus it set off the flamewar detector, and we didn't turn the penalties off because the post didn't contain significant new information (SNI), which is the test we apply (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Current post does contain SNI so it's still high on HN's front page.
Why do we do it this way? Not to protect any organization (including YC itself, and certainly including OpenAI or any other BigCo), but simply to avoid repetition. Repetition is the opposite of intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), which is what we're hoping to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
I hesitate to say "it's as simple as that" because HN is a complicated beast and there are always other factors, but...it's kind of as simple as that.
But it doesn't vary based on specific persons (not Sam or anyone else). Substantive criticism is fine, but predictable one-liners and that sort of thing are not what we want here—especially since they evoke even worse from others.
The idea of HN is to have an internet forum—to the extent possible—where discussion remains intellectually interesting. The kind of comments we're talking about tend to choke all of that out, so downweighting them is very much in HN's critical path.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
This is the final comment [1] that got Michael’s account banned.
You can see dang’s reply [2] directly underneath his which says:
> We've banned this account.
1: >>10017538
2: >>10019003
Did you know that people who have been involved with Y Combinator who make an account on HN can see everyone else who has been a part of Y Combinator? Their usernames are highlighted a different color.
It's a literal secret club that they rarely acknowledge.
In my experience, founders need all the help they can get making friends, I'm glad they have a little club!
I would also suggest such conversation would need to be corralled into some sort of secondary HN forum branch, discussion on observations, insights, etc. In general it could be useful for people to also learn about observing patterns for their own sites they own or manage.
I do understand it can facilitate a bit of a "weapons" race, in that if there are bad actors seeking to have many human looking bot accounts (or a single person orchestrating many accounts), then they now too would see how their fingerprints look compared to others as well.
Ultimately I think Elon Musk is right though that to help dissuade spam and organizations-ideologues from shaping narratives and controlling what's allowed to be seen and discussed, that an actual $ cost is required.
Perhaps HN could implement a $5/month (or even higher tiers)? For most on HN, if they are in the tech field, even $50/month for arguably a higher curated-"more moderated" forum, isn't much for the individual - and if a filter to only show posts and/or comments by those paying AND/OR better yet, filtering based on including only votes by those at different tiers - then that is affordable compared to say someone who maybe somehow is running 1,000 users; although unfortunately $50,000/month isn't much for organizations or nations with an agenda, if that's all it takes to keep certain truths suppressed as much and as quickly as possible.
Sorry, you may be (are probably) being perfectly honest and sincere, but... It's still too many coincidences not to give rise to doubts. If about nothing else, then about the weights in your algorithms (the post of a negative-headline article that lasted under two hours on the front page didn't look all that much more flame-war-y to me than the one off a positive-headline one that lasted over twelve) or your definition of "significant" ("Breaking news, OAI says they didn't do it!" Yeah right, how is that significant; which crook doesn't say that wasn't actually his paw in the cookie jar?).
Or maybe it's bigger; maybe it's time for the, uhm, "tone" of the entire site to change? I mean, society at large seems to have come to the insight that wannabe rentier techbros just aren't likely to be good guys. And maybe your intended audience -- "startup hackers", something like that, right? -- are beginning to resemble mainstream society in this respect?
Maybe we "Hackers" are coming to the realisation that on the current trajectory of the tech industry in the late-stage capitalism era, "two guys with their laptops in a garage" are not very likely to become even (paltry!) multi-millionaires, because all the other "two guys with their laptops in a garage" ten-fifteen-twenty years ago (well, the ones of them that made it, anyway) installed such insurmountable moats around their respective fiefdoms ("pulled up the ladder behind them", as we'd say if they were twenty years older) that making it big as an actual "Hacker" is becoming nigh-impossible?
I mean, to try and illustrate by example: The Zuck zucks even in the mind of most HN regulars, right? But if you trawl through early posts (pre-2017? -14? -10?), betcha he's on average much more revered here than he is now. A bit like Musk still seems to be, and up until a year or whatever ago, that other Sam (Frazzled Blinkman?) was, and... The rate and mechanism of change here seems to be "Oops, yet another exception, a wannabe rentier techbro who turned out to be a slimebag. But as a group, wannabe rentier techbros are of course still great!" Maybe it's time to go through the algorithms and prejudices and turn down all the explicit and implicit the "Wannabe Zuck[1] = Must be great!" dials?
Because as it is, these biases -- "just percieved" as you seem to be saying, "implicit and built into the very foundations of HN" as I'd tentatively say; does it even matter which it is? -- seem to be making HN not a forum for the current-day "two guys with their laptops in a garage", but for fanboyism of the (current and) next group of Bezoses, Zuckerbergs and Musks[1]. Sorry, I haven't checked out the mission statement recently (even though you so graciously linked to it), but is that really what HN is supposed to be?
___
[1]: Well, I'm old enough that I almost wrote "Gates and Ellison" there... Add them in if you want.
The key word there is "seemingly". You notice what you're biased to notice and generalize based on that. People with diferent views notice different things and make different generalizations.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...