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.
Which is interesting, because it's sacrilege to insinuate that it's being gamed at all.
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.