I expect even more censorship on this site for the next few years (especially criticism) as even the mods and higher ups are kneeling down on this administration just a few hours into it.
Not a good look.
That's nearly always the case when you see [flagged] on a submission, btw. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
(It's a bit more complex with comments, but also the majority of [flagged] comments are flagged by users, not mods.)
It seems entirely disingenuous to come into this thread and pretend you are entirely separated from the flagging of this post when you are actively supporting it!
More at >>42776410
That's not to say that the HN discussion went well, but we can't control that. We can only play the odds, and it's important to.
I'm going to do my job the same way as always. History will come to its own conclusions.
This sort of flare-up always feels absolutely critical in the moment—how can one possibly justify not dropping everything to orbit around it?—and then vanishes. Their half life is so brief that I'm surprised people don't notice how ephemeral they are. They come in an endless sequence, and they aren't what HN is supposed to be for. They're also not that hard to resist; it's not as if this is a borderline call.
Anyway, I know moderation is difficult, but I want to gently suggest that this feels like a double standard.
I know it's how Trump and Elon work: they make outrage after outrage, crime after crime, so that one shadows the other, we can't keep track, we get exhausted, etc.
But there has to be a tipping point, or we just boil like frogs in the fascism saucepan.
If this is not the tipping point, what will it be? A proud, intense, in-your-face nazi salute, the day of the inauguration. If your tipping point is when they finally come after you, you'll be all alone. It's textbook 1930s Germany.
You seem to be saying there will be no tipping point for you. People wonder how the darkest moments of history happened, and how people let it happen.
This is how.
You guys are talking about this (both the stimulus and the response) as if it's some unusual phenomenon. It's not—it's the most standard aspect of HN moderation. If we didn't moderate this way, HN would be a completely different site; the front page would be filled with the latest outrages. To see that, all you have to do is multiply the present situation by a sufficiently large number.
It always feels as if the latest high-energy stimulus as the important one, the indispensable one, the one where things will fall apart if we don't stop everything and argue about it right now. HN is about trying to disengage ourselves from that brain-chemistry ratwheel. I realize that energy is running higher than usual because of the events of yesterday, but again, that's the sort of dynamic this site is about not being determined by—irrespective of political position or feelings about celebrities.
In past threads I've described this as the difference between reflexive and reflective discussion. If anyone wants to understand the basic approach, maybe some of that would help: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
There was absolutely nothing for millions of people to believe Elon had either nazi ideology or saw Nazi mannerisms as a valid populist angle before yesterday, I myself found this development very enlightening - and this is where I first found it.
As for the rest of your comment; ironically, I think flagging this as early as it was (I was there) was more reflexive than any comment you'd find in this thread. I understand where you’re coming from because moderation is crucial when discussions go off the rails. But there’s room for thoughtful conversation here, beyond the hot takes. Some comments will be reflexive or partisan, but letting the discussion happen (with supervision) can surface more reflective points, too. Shutting it down early misses those insights - in fact, it's caused more negatively reflective points on the trend of moderation here.
On the other hand, a thoughtful pg essay and a sensational 3-second video clip of the most trollicious person on the internet are pretty different on (let's call it) the genre spectrum, and that's an important consideration for HN moderation too.
As inconsistent and arbitrary as individual moderation calls may feel or be, though, the principles of HN moderation have been surprisingly consistent over the years, and that's the more important level. We don't always apply them correctly or consistently, but I think the principles themselves are good ones for this site and are easily defensible. Most of what I do in moderation comments like this is try to explain those principles, though usually the commenters are concerned about one particular story, at least in the moment.
One point that might be worth adding (or maybe not, but here it is): when you say "moderation is crucial" and "letting the discussion happen (with supervision)", I feel like you're overestimating the capacity of moderation. It is a scarce resource in several ways, some obvious some not. Part of this is about trying to invest it wisely.
For example, I put huge effort into moderating the thread about pg's "origins of wokeness" essay (>>42682305 ) and ended up, at the end of a long day, feeling like I had hardly made a dent. (The current case would certainly be worse.) So when you argue for letting a particularly flame-prone thread burn and posit that it can be turned into a thoughtful conversation by sufficiently effective moderation, my sense is "I don't think that's realistic".
Anyhow, that's a secondary consideration, but it is consistent with the primary considerations.
(Btw I had deleted the first paragraph of my comment because I felt it was cuttable, but since you quoted it, I've put it back.)
Good that we have this comment, and history has been written (as some users pointed out).
I hope a lot of you, audience of HN get in touch with the famous poem "First they came" and connect the dots.
This is a forum site for discussion between people that have accounts.
Given the technical background of the forum demographic having an account that's either largely anonymous or directly tied to a real identity is no great drama.
It's not possible to run a site like HN without moderation. However, if you delete moderated posts outright, users will rightly complain about censorship. I'm not referring to the politics of the last 10 years when I use that word; I'm talking about 2006 or so, when pg was first designing HN. The solution he came up with, which has held up well over the years, is not to delete moderated posts, but rather to tag them as "[dead]" in a way that anyone who wants to read them is welcome to.
So what you call "hiding the news from people without an account", I call "not deleting anything and making sure that anyone who wants to can read the complete set of moderated posts".
This is in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and there's lots of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
(p.s. for those who like precision: HN does also have deletion, but only the author of a post is allowed to delete it, and only if it didn't have replies. We sometimes delete posts when users email and ask us to, but we never do this as part of moderation.)
Rather, I understand and appreciate the moderation strategy as it applies to discussion.
That said, there's a subset of intellectually stimulating news that also happens to not be great discussion material.
In the hypothetical where there's some important news that warrants being seen but you know the discussion would be impossible, why is there no option to just lock the discussion?
Again, this is a hypothetical where the* news is deemed intellectually stimulating, important, or otherwise deserving* to be shown.
I trust you have a reasonable answer, I just didn't see it in your comment.
I respect the efforts you put in and the wonderful place it carves out on* the internet. Thank you!
Edit: edits
I don't think locking comments out of threads would be in keeping with HN's mandate. We try to optimize for intellectual curiosity [1]. Preventing users from commenting, and reading each other's comments, would go against that.
I also feel like it would be a shallow technical trick to avoid facing the deeper issue of us all learning how to be with each other, including with others who come from different backgrounds and have different views [2]. I'd rather face the hard problem squarely and see what we can do about it together—even though this brings many cases that suck and feel awful.
Also, I don't think the community would like it. HN users would probably just keep posting until they got a thread where they could comment. I try not to fight the community in that way. Having made the mistake of doing so in the past, I can tell you that (1) you can't win, and (2) it is painful!
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] >>23308098 is a longer post about that if anyone wants more
The right place to look for consistency is at the level of moderation principles, and there I do think we've been consistent over the years. Do we apply the principles optimally? No. Do we mostly apply them ok? I hope so. If not, I probably shouldn't be doing this job.
There's another point which is important here. Unfortunately it's more subtle and I'm not sure I can explain it well but I'll try:
There is a temporal decay of interestingness in any sequence of related stories. Curiosity withers under repetition, so we can't have too much repetition [2], and that means we can't have too many predictable sequences [3].
When you have a sequence of related stories (S1, S2, ... Sn), once S1 has had significant attention, S2 becomes less interesting (in HN's sense of the word) until enough time goes by. This, for example, is why we downweight follow-ups [4]. Time counteracts repetition ("everything old is new again"), so letting enough time go by is one solution [5], but that takes longer than people usually want it to.
What this means is that we can't treat related stories consistently, because how interesting they are doesn't only depend on the story—it also depends on what else has been discussed recently. S2 might be a more important story than S1, but if they're related enough and S1 was discussed recently, then S2 becomes less interesting, qua HN topic, than it would have been absent that S1 thread. If you take seriously the principle of avoiding repetition, that is how we have to moderate. Otherwise the same few themes (the hottest ones) would dominate the site.
It is something of a lottery which story (S1 or S2) shows up first and so "wins". But if you only consider the articles, and not the sequence, this is inconsistent! "Why is S1 on-topic while S2 is not?" is inevitably a common question.
As moderators we're more concerned about the overall functioning of the site (e.g. not having too much repetition) than we are about specific stories. Users, on the other hand, are concerned with specific stories, and rightly so—why should they care about the global state of the site? It should just be there and be good enough.
This disconnect flares up when users are personally interested in S2 and don't see why S1 got to "win" and now S2 has to suffer. This is a consequence of mod attention and user attention being scoped at different levels. It's our job to care about the global state while users' job is to care about what interests them (specific stories). To a reader who cares specifically about S2 (and we all have our S2s), this feels like unfair prejudice.
To treat all stories consistently, we'd have to go back and rearrange the sequence (S1, S2, ..., Sn) over time. That's not doable, and from a moderation point of view, not so important either. There is an endless stream of stories in every category. Few matter much in the long run. We try to make sure that the major ones get discussed (e.g. right now, the launching of the $500B data center project and the Ross Ulbricht pardon) but that too is subjective. I'm sure that some commenters in this thread feel like the Musk video is more important than those.
What does all this mean? Maybe it means that people are right that the mods are inconsistent, error-prone, and biased, but a bit less so than at first appears.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[5] That's why HN allows reposts after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
Thank you for the insight!
I and many others see something very blatant in the video, and you dismissing that is lazy and frankly, it makes you look biased.
Ive generally been impressed with HN moderation, but this is a very glaring exception.
I'm glad you can admit that your attrition in moderating another post to your self-satisfaction was what encouraged you to make the decision to not even bother attempting with this one, not sarcasm. Self-awareness in our consideration of things is critical, and something I find us all (including me) needing more work on.
Moderation is scarce, yes, but a lot of executive decisions on the visibility of threads and comments are delegated to active users. As it should be - mind you, but it's not like it's fought alone here. I think a lot of us are willing to help, if it means topics worth talking about - especially when a lot of people think so - can stay around.
> your attrition in moderating another post to your self-satisfaction was what encouraged you to make the decision to not even bother attempting with this one
It was, as I said, a secondary consideration. The primary ones are the ones I've spent much more time explaining, because they're primary. If they had pointed the other way then I would have gone against that preference in myself. I do agree with you about self-awareness, though; it is a precious thing and probably the most elusive one.
p.s. for selfish reasons I'd be curious to hear your take on >>42787306 , in which I attempted at unfortunate length to talk about this issue from a different angle. Don't read it unless you're actually interested though. It wouldn't be surprising if no one were; sometimes I just write these things to get them out of my system.
In that thread's comment, your “sequence” perspective makes sense; it’s clearly more complex than it looks from the outside, and I don’t envy the ontological challenge of deciding which submissions are repetitive or closely related. Still, from a user standpoint, it can feel inconsistent: sometimes S1 and S2 look almost identical, and the fact that S1 “won” first might be just because the earliest, most active users or moderators happened to see it and push it forward. After that, the community tends to gravitate toward S1 by default, so S2 never really gets a fair shake, even if it’s potentially more interesting or revealing. That's just c'est la vie.
But this thread feels like a good example of that mismatch. If S1 got topped while S2 was flagged or buried, and users are complaining in a relatively united way, maybe that’s a sign the initial choice favored the wrong post - or standing on the "offending" post (if no S1 is, in fact, present). Sometimes it’s worth re-checking whether the “winner-loser” framing actually got it right. A bit more leeway for topics that initially look flame like a flame war farm could reveal more thoughtful angles than expected, especially if the community is giving feedback that S2 might actually be the more worthwhile discussion (as we saw here - I think we're also seeing it in the Ross Ulbricht pardon thread: >>42787555 ).
Anyway, I appreciate the deeper look at how you’re handling these issues. It helps me see why certain threads get the bird! I think, especially for you and because of the stated mission of HN, that you believe - even more than me - that it's always a shame when we miss the better conversation.
everyone has their own favorite topics and if i see posts with my preferred topics not get traction i am disappointed. but there are so many reasons why that may have happened, it's not worth losing sleep over, much less blame moderation.
there is no agenda here to promote the right stories and hide the wrong ones. the only goal is to promote engaging discussions. those discussions are why i am coming here. i will also admit to often checking comments first exactly because i want to see if there is an engaging discussion that i would want to join.
for this particular topic it is morbid curiosity to see if an engaging discussion will ever happen. so far it hasn't, which matches my expectations. (well, except for this sub thread about moderation)
which wrong post would that have been? i don't think there was any. the same users that are complaining about the flags are also not actually engaging in a worthwhile discussion. there are enough people here that did find this topic. it has, after all, reached at least 50 points before it got flagged. i'd even say that it was flagged because it got popular. and that means, despite the flags, this topic should have enough traction for an engaging discussion, and yet, no such discussion is happening. i have not seen a single comment worth engaging with.
instead of complaining, someone should write a critical editorial about what happened and what it all means. but i think it is to early for that. this was posted right after it happened. i believe we actually need to wait for the uproar to die down before we can have a calm and critical discussion of the events. wait a few days or a week or so until someone will write that editorial, and then we can discuss it here.
You're wrong.
It's not going away: https://www.axios.com/2025/01/23/elon-musk-nazi-joke-adl
It's who and what he is: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/25/elon-musk...
It's who he wants to be.